Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~7 min read
Chapter 16: I choose you
He courted her.
He was aware this was absurd. They were married. They had been married for five months, by law and clan custom and the binding strip of MacKinnon tartan. He had sat across from her at every meal, shared a chamber every night, ridden beside her over the hills every other morning. He did not need to court a woman who was already, technically and legally, his wife.
He did it anyway.
He left things.
The first thing was a bunch of heather — the purple late-summer kind, cut from the eastern hillside where it grew best — left on the table in the chamber on the morning after the stable. He had not written a note. Notes required language and language required him to articulate things he was still working up to articulating, and he had decided to let the gesture go first and the words follow when he was sure of them.
She had looked at the heather for a long time when she found it.
She had not said anything. But she’d taken a small sprig and pinned it to her dress, which was more than enough.
The second thing was a figure he carved. He carved when he could sleep, which was not often — a habit from his father, who had found the same utility in it, the way the hands occupied with small work freed the mind from its own worst tendencies. He had carved a horse, grey, a passable likeness of Rosalind, and he set it on her side of the table without announcement.
She came in and found it and held it in her palm for a moment, and looked at him — he was at his own side of the table, reading, pretending he was not watching — and said: “This is very good.”
“Ye’re kind.”
“It’s accurate. She has that exact set to her ears.” She set the horse on the windowsill where the light hit it. She looked at him. “You’re wooing me.”
“Ye’re already my wife.”
“You’re wooing me despite that fact.” She said it with the tone she used when she was amused and wasn’t quite ready to admit it. “We’re already married, MacKinnon.”
“Aye.” He put his book down. “But I want ye to choose me.” He said it with the plainness of something he had decided on and was committed to. “No’ because ye’re here and there’s no alternative. Because ye look at me and see — what I am. And choose it.”
She looked at him across the table. She had been looking at him since August with something in her face that was different from every earlier version of her expression — open in a way that the first months had not been, warm in a way he did not take lightly because he understood what the warmth had cost her, what it required her to set aside.
“I do choose you,” she said.
“Then let me do this right,” he said. “Let me give ye the thing I couldnae give ye at the beginning. The courtship. The—” he stopped, because he was about to say the word and he wanted it to be right, wanted it to be in the right moment and not the wrong one. “The chance to be chosen properly.”
She looked at him for a long time. He held it, as he always held her long looks — completely, because she deserved to be looked back at without flinching.
“All right,” she said. “Court me, then.”
He did.
September brought the Highland autumn, and he brought her things and showed her things and talked to her about things he hadn’t talked to anyone about in a long time — the clan’s history, the complicated politics of the border, the book he’d been reading when the raids began and had set down and never finished, his mother’s stories about the MacKinnon land before any of them were alive to see it. She listened with the full engaged attention she brought to everything worth listening to and she pushed back when she disagreed, which was regularly, and he found that the disagreement was its own form of intimacy — the specific pleasure of a person who was not agreeing to agree but was genuinely present in the thinking.
She was learning to trust him. He could see it — not a single moment but the pattern of moments, the accumulation of evidence that he was as good as his word. She talked to him now about things she hadn’t in the summer: her father, who she was fond of; her brother James, who she was genuinely close to; the way the Whitmore estate had felt from the first night, the walls pressing in, the particular quality of a life that fit wrong.
“Did you love him?” Callum asked one evening, and then felt the question was both necessary and dangerous.
She was quiet for a moment. “I respected him,” she said. “I thought respect was sufficient. I had been taught that love was—” she paused. “Inconvenient. A thing that got in the way of sensible arrangements.”
“And now?”
She looked at him across the fire. “Now I think I had no idea what any of it meant.”
He thought about saying it then. He had been thinking about saying it for two months, which was precisely how long he had known it with certainty, though the knowledge had been building for longer. He wanted to say it right — not in the middle of a point about something else, not casually, not with the awkward urgency of a man who had held it too long and was releasing the pressure. He wanted it to be its own moment.
He was still working out when that moment was.
Morag found him in the great hall the following morning and told him directly, because Morag did not believe in the indirect approach when directness was available.
“Tell her,” she said.
“I’m—”
“Now, ye stubborn oaf.”
He looked at her.
“She loves ye. She’s been loving ye since July at the latest and she has told me so directly, which she wouldnae have done if she didnae trust me, and I’m telling ye because I have spent forty years watching MacKinnon men convince themselves they dinnae deserve the things they want and I am too old to watch another one.” She pointed at the staircase. “Tell her.”
He went upstairs.
She was in the chamber, braiding her hair, which she did every morning at the window with the unhurried attention of someone who has found a task she likes for its own sake. She looked up when he came in. Read him, as she always did.
“Callum,” she said.
“I love ye,” he said. There it was. No preamble, no arrangement, just the thing itself. “Truly. No’ because ye’re my wife. No’ because we’re here together and it was convenient. Because ye’re the most infuriating, capable, honest, remarkable person I’ve met in my life, and the past five months have been — more than I thought I was going to have. More than I thought I deserved.”
She had stopped braiding.
“I love you,” she said. “I’ve loved you for months.”
He stared at her.
“Why did ye no’ say?!” He heard himself say it and the absurdity of it hit him at the same moment it apparently hit her.
“You didn’t say!” she said, and then she laughed — the full surprised laugh he loved most, the one that came out when she wasn’t managing herself — and he laughed too, which was the thing that happened when you had been an idiot together for long enough.
He crossed the chamber. She met him halfway. He kissed her and she kissed him back and the MacKinnon tartan sash was somewhere on the window seat and the morning light was gold and he thought: *this is what a second chance is.*
He held it as carefully as it deserved.
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