Page 26 of Fierce Highland Longing

Two weeks ago there was weight on him. It had gone off faster than it came.

Two weeks ago there was color in his face. There was none now.

Two weeks ago he named every bird on that headland whether I asked or not, and the weather, and what the tide was doing under a boat. He had not named anything in three days.

I put my hand on his wrist, reaching past him for the kettle, and his skin was cold.

That was the part I could not get past. The night I hauled him off those rocks, he had been in the North Sea in October, and his hand was not cold, and it was the first wrong thing I ever noticed about him. He had sat by a peat fire for a fortnight, and now he was cold.

Two weeks of getting better. Four days of this. He was four feet from it in a drawer and now the drawer was shut. He was going the other way, fast.

I contemplated what it all meant.

The reasons were good.

Callum Brodie folded that oilcloth. Which meant he had known where it was for nineteen years, and he had been in my room once already, and there was not a lock on that door worth the name. The safest place for that skin was on my body or four feet from my bed with me lying awake beside it.

That was my first thought.

The second one I did not like either. I had tried to give it to him already. I put it on the table and told him it was his. He sat three feet away and did not touch it, and I still do not understand what I did wrong. I don’t know how to give a man a thing he won’t pick up.

On Friday afternoon, I went up for a dry pair of socks and found myself standing at the wardrobe.

I opened the bottom drawer. I didn’t take it out.

I put my hand on it through the layers, and the beat came up into my palm the way it always had, slow and steady and going on and on.

And a sentence arrived in my head, whole and finished and in my own voice.

He would stay.

Not dead. Not gone into the water and away up the coast to go hunting four people who were born the same year as him. Here. On land. Alive, slow, graying, and here. If I kept it in this drawer, he would still be sitting in that chair by the window at Christmas.

I know that life. I had lived it before.

I said yes to a man for six years because leaving meant losing him, and I sat in a car outside a wedding venue with a photograph of a chair in my lap.

I pushed the drawer shut and sat down on the floor with my back against the bed. My hands were shaking.

I didn’t know what to do.

Later, I opened the laptop and stared at the email that had been there for two weeks. I closed the lid.

By evening, he was worse than he had been at noon.

The gray at the corners of his handsome mouth had moved. I had looked at that gray a dozen times since the first week and written it downunchangedevery time. It was up along the jaw now on the left side.

He ages wrong and fast. Any place that sees him for three weeks a year will say he has gone gray in a season and blame drink or hard living. They don’t know him.

We sat at the fire.

“Isla’s chimney’s drawing badly.”

“It’s the wind sitting on it.”

“Will it hold?”

“Aye.”