Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~5 min read
Chapter 24: Five years
Mairead had her father’s stubbornness and her mother’s sharp tongue and had been combining these qualities to considerable effect since approximately the age of eighteen months, when she had achieved full verbal capability and proceeded to use it with a comprehensiveness that made the entire clan either delighted or exhausted depending on the day.
She was five now.
She was five in the way of children who have grown up surrounded by adults who take them seriously — not spoiled, exactly, but certain of her own value in the way that some children were and some weren’t, and the clan would have told you, if asked, that Lady MacKinnon’s daughter was the most MacKinnon child that had ever been MacKinnon, by which they meant: fierce, loyal, opinionated, and not available to be argued with once she had decided something.
She had two brothers — the twins, who would be four in December and were currently engaged in a project involving the courtyard fountain and the three best cats belonging to the keep, and who were, by all available evidence, going to be a problem.
Isolde stood at the kitchen garden wall in the September afternoon — five years, almost exactly, since Mairead had arrived — and watched the twins and felt the particular quality of happiness that had no anxiety in it, the clean kind.
“Do ye ever regret it?” Callum said.
She turned. He had come up beside her without sound, which she had stopped noticing as alarming approximately four years ago and now registered as simply him. He was looking at the twins too, and at Mairead who was in the garden with Morag, pulling things from the ground with the determined thoroughness she brought to all tasks.
“No,” she said.
“Never? Not one morning—”
“Not one morning.” She turned to look at him. Thirty-five years old, which had arrived in June, and which had not changed him in any way she could identify except that there were more silver threads in his hair. She had told him it looked distinguished. He had looked at her with the expression he used for statements he suspected were kind rather than accurate. “Do you?”
“No.” He said it with the flatness of complete certainty. “Never.”
She looked back at the valley. The September light was the same as it had been five years ago — the same gold and grey, the same hills enormous against the same sky. The same smell of heather and cold water and the particular clean quality of Highland air that she had lived inside long enough to no longer notice except on mornings when something made her notice it again.
“England feels like a different life,” she said.
“Aye.”
“Not a bad life. Just—” she paused, looking for the right word. “Not mine.”
“This is yours,” he said.
“Yes.” She turned to look at him again. “You’re mine.”
He held her eyes in the way he always did — completely, without hurry, with the particular quality of a man who has decided that looking at this person is worth giving his full attention to. After five years she still felt it.
“And ye’re mine,” he said.
Mairead chose this moment to appear at the garden wall with something green and triumphant in her fist and an expression that said she had found something and intended to tell them about it at length.
“Màthair!” she said, in the Gaelic that was her first language. “Look what I found—”
“What have ye got?” Callum said, crouching to her level.
Isolde listened to her daughter explain the find to her father in Gaelic, her small hands gesturing, her face entirely committed to the importance of the information, and she thought about the woman who had stood in a dark stable thinking she was safe and had been carried north into a life she hadn’t chosen.
She thought: *I have chosen it every day since.*
She thought: *every single day.*
She spoke Gaelic fluently now. She wore the MacKinnon tartan as naturally as she had once worn English muslin. She had delivered the twins herself, with Morag at her elbow, and the clan had responded to this information with the quiet approval of people who had learned to expect it from their Lady. She had written to her father and to James, and James had come to the Highlands the previous spring — had ridden up the glen with the particular expression of an English gentleman who had prepared to be surprised and was being surprised — and had spent a week and left understanding something that she suspected he was still processing.
Her father had not come. She had accepted this with the measured sadness of someone who understands that not everyone can make the journey, and she had kept writing, and he had kept writing back, and it was a relationship that existed at a distance and was real within that distance, which was perhaps more than some had.
“Màthair,” Mairead said, tugging at her skirt now, the find apparently requiring both parents’ full attention.
“I see,” Isolde said, crouching too, because Callum had set the standard and she was not going to be less interested than him in whatever Mairead had pulled from the earth. “What is it?”
“A worm,” Mairead said, with full gravity. “A very important one.”
“How do ye know it’s important?” Callum said.
“Because I found it,” Mairead said, in the tone of someone explaining an obvious thing.
Isolde looked at her husband over their daughter’s head. He looked back at her with the expression — the warm, unguarded, full one — and she knew that they were both thinking the same thing, which was that this child was, without question, theirs.
“Very important,” she agreed.
She had not expected this life.
She was grateful for every part of it.
Reader Reactions