Page 53 of The Highland Ghost’s Virgin

"It doesnae fit on the left, Senga."

"It fit on the left for eleven years before ye started working here."

"Then the crock has changed."

"The crock," Senga said, with great patience, "has nae changed."

Nora's fist worked steadily. Alpin sat with his shoulders dropped to a height Grisselle had not previously seen them reach before noon.

She could hear all of it. All at once, the whole loud ordinary weight of the keep.

She picked up a piece of bread, pulled it apart, and decided she wasn't going to name what the morning felt like. She was just going to sit in it instead and enjoy every feeling it brought.

The castle emptied the way it sometimes did on clear afternoons — all at once, without announcement, as if everyone had agreed on it privately and forgotten to mention it to her.

Senga went to the village for salt and would surely come back with opinions she'd air at supper. Greer took Cait to the linen store. Isobel had disappeared after the midday meal with a book and her boots on, which meant she'd gone to the hill and wouldn't be back until the light failed. Even Niall, who had no particular business inside the castle walls but turned up in them anyway with reliable frequency, was gone.

Grisselle carried Nora to the window seat in the east room and sat down with her, and for a long time didn't do anything else.

The loch was grey today, a different grey from yesterday's. It was flatter, the hills behind it blurred at the edges where the cloud came low. She'd learned in the last weeks that the loch was never the same color two days running, and she'd started checking it in the mornings the way she used to check the London weather for what it would require of her wardrobe, except this required nothing of her at all. It just changed. She just watched.

Nora was awake, working her mouth around something that wasn't there yet, her eyes at the window.

"That's the loch," Grisselle told her. "Alpin already explained it to you, I know. I'm telling you again because he missed some of it." She shifted her to a better angle against her arm. "It's grey today. Yesterday it was blue. Last Tuesday it was a color I don't have a name for — greenish, sort of, with a brown underneath. You'll have to see it in summer, apparently. Isobel says it goes silver in July and you can see straight to the bottom on a clear day."

Nora's fist opened and closed against Grisselle's sleeve.

"I told Isobel I didn't want children," Grisselle said. “But honestly, you have changed my choice without even trying much.”

She hadn't meant to say it out loud.

She'd meant it when she said it. She could still find the shape of the thought. The way it had felt like honesty when she'd offered it up in Isobel's room by the fire, the relief of saying a thing plainly without dressing it up.

I don't want children.

Simple. True.

Nora turned her face against Grisselle's arm and made a sound that was almost nothing, just the smallest complaint against the cold coming off the glass.

Grisselle tucked the blanket up higher.

She'd thought she'd understood why, when she'd said it. She'd given herself sensible reasons, the kind that made a tidy line of logic. She was too restless, too unsuited to confinement, too accustomed to being overlooked herself to trust that she wouldn't replicate it. She'd believed all of that. She still thought most of it was true.

What she hadn't accounted for was this.

This specific weight. This specific smell of the top of a head, which she hadn't known was a smell until she had a head to put her nose to. The way Nora's whole body went slack and trusting in sleep, with no knowledge yet that the world required you to be on guard in it, no understanding yet that the people holding you might put you down.

I know what it is to be handed off to whoever's convenient.

She'd said that to Alpin in the kitchen, angry and certain. She hadn't said the rest of it, hadn't said: I was twelve and I learned early that the way to stop minding was to stop wanting to be held in the first place.

She looked down at Nora.

Nora looked up at her with the dark, unfocused eyes of the very new, who can't yet tell one face from another but turn toward warmth by instinct.

When did that stop being true?

Not the wanting — she understood now that the wanting had never stopped, only gone underground. Not the wanting. The part where she'd decided it was safer to call it a preference instead of a wound.