"And ye'll tell me about the bairn. Tonight, at dinner. What she likes, and what makes her stop cryin'. Everything ye ken, which I suspect is less than ye think."
"It is significantly less than I think," he said.
"Aye." She allowed herself, briefly, a small smile. "I ken."
She moved toward the door. She stopped with her hand on the frame and looked back at him, standing in the middle of the small room with the afternoon light falling through the window across the floor.
"Her name," she said. "What did ye call her?"
"Lilly," he said. "I decided in the corridor. Three weeks ago."
"Lilly," Margaret repeated. She turned it over, the sound of it. "That's a good name."
Chapter Three
Isobel found her at the window.
Margaret had not gone back to the courtyard after she left him standing in the receiving room. She had gone up the narrow stairs to the room she had slept in for nine months, the one with the uneven floorboard near the door and the window that looked northeast toward the ridge, and she had stood with her hands flat on the sill, breathing.
Below, the children were still in the courtyard. Catriona had abandoned the flower crowns in favor of organizing a game that appeared to involve a great deal of running and no discernible rules. The twins were sitting in a patch of sun, eating something they had found on the ground, which Margaret decided, from this distance, not to investigate.
She heard Isobel's step on the stairs. She knew it as well as she knew her own.
"He's agreed to all me terms," Margaret said, without turning.
Isobel came to stand beside her at the window. She did not speak immediately. That was one of the things Margaret had learned to love about her, the ability to be present without filling every silence.
"I heard some of it," Isobel said. "I wasnae eavesdroppin'. The door doesnae close properly."
"I ken. I've been meanin' to ask Donal about it since March."
"Are ye all right?"
Margaret considered this question honestly, the way she had learned to do this year, instead of responding with her first immediate feeling. She stood at the window, looked at the courtyard, the children, and the gray stone walls she had grown familiar with, and she examined what was really happening inside her chest.
"I daenae ken," she said. "Ask me again in a week."
Isobel was quiet for a moment. "What did he say? When ye gave him the terms?"
"He agreed to them."
"Ye told me that, but what did he say?"
Margaret turned from the window. She sat on the edge of the bed, the mattress dipping under her, and looked at her hands in her lap. "He said I had made meself clear. He said he could see I wasnae the woman he had left." She paused. "He said it would be a considerable waste of me gifts to put me anywhere other than where I had demanded to be."
Isobel was quiet for a moment. "Considerable waste of yer gifts?"
"Aye."
"That is quite possibly the most Fergus MacKenzie compliment that has ever been given by any man in the history of the Highlands."
Margaret looked up. Something in her chest loosened—a small release she had not realized she was holding—and she laughed. It was shorter than her usual laughs, more compressed, but it felt genuine.
"It is, isnae it?" she said.
Isobel sat beside her on the bed, the way she had sat beside her on a hundred evenings this past year, in this room, in the kitchen, in the hall by the fire. Close enough that their shoulders touched. She did not reach for Margaret's hand. She did not need to. The proximity said everything.
"Tell me what ye're afraid of," Isobel said quietly. "Nae what ye're plannin'. Nae what ye've decided. What ye're afraid of."
