Page 36 of Fierce Highland Longing

He came anyway.

“There’s a thing the sea wants to give you. It’s not mine to hand over, and it can’t be done yet.”

“What does that mean?”

“There’s something I want to show you. But we’ll have to wait for the moon.”

I held his gaze. “Yes,” I said, before I had any idea what I was agreeing to.

Because for the first time in six years, I was choosing something.

Not running. Not hiding.

Choosing.

Chapter Sixteen

What Refuses to Love Freely — Tavish

Sixweekson,andthe moon came round full on a Thursday.

And now, I can put the skin on when I like and take it off when I like. I hung it on a nail in the small room off the back hall where anybody could walk past it. I go out most mornings before light and come in for my breakfast. I sleep in that room, which Isla has decided to have no opinion about, and she has told two separate people I’m her cousin’s boy from Wick, and I’ve let her.

Mara’s out of the strap. She’s shooting the boats—the fleet, the men, the whole working season, and there’s a gallery in Aberdeen that wants forty of them by March. She’s told me twice that it pays about a third of what she turned down. She seems pleased about that in a way I’ve given up following.

Her wee silver thistle was still in the dish by her lamp with the camera batteries. She’s never once picked it up, and she’s never moved it either, that I know of.

I have seven stones on the windowsill in my room now. Nobody’s ever counted them but me.

I found her on the beach before dawn, the camera around her neck, the coat I gave her pulled tight against the wind. She wasshooting the water, but she wasn’t hiding behind the camera anymore.

I stood beside her and waited for her to finish snapping shots.

“You’re early,” she said.

“You’re earlier.”

She laughed, and the sound went across the water like it belonged there.

"Come. Let's walk to the pool." I led the way. The pool was silver and luminous.

We didn’t speak for a while. The seals came up past the mooring, heads bobbing, watching us the way they watch the boats. One of them rolled in the water and showed its belly, white as the moon that had pulled the tide up the night before.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” I said.

She turned the camera off and looked at me.

“The sea doesn’t forget a debt.”

She waited.

“What you did in that cave—it wasn’t just for me. The water remembers. It remembers what was given, and what was taken, and what was left behind.”

“And Callum?”

“The sea took him. Not as punishment. As balance.”

She nodded, like she’d known that already.