Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
“And yet you just swim in the loch every chance you get.”
“I have nothing to fear.”
His face changes again, becomes softer somehow, and he sets the whisky down. He looks at the fire for a long second, and when he speaks, his voice has gone quieter.
“The women on your aunt’s list. If she meant the drowned wives, they were taken. Over a very long period of time.”
“By what?”
“By something in these parts.”
“Something…a person? An animal?”
He doesn’t answer, just raises a shoulder in a light shrug.
I let out a long, frustrated sigh. So helpful.
“The village has known about them and not spoken of them for as long as there have been villages on this coast,” he eventually says. “Your aunt was one of those who kept what she knew. She kept it well.”
“That literally doesn’t answer my question.”
“I suppose it doesn’t. I’m sorry I don’t have any answers to give you.”
I fight the urge to roll my eyes.
“Did you know any of them? The women on the list.”
A pause. The pause goes on a long time.
“I don’t know of this list without seeing it. But, aye, I knew of the drowned wives. I made a point of knowing of them. They were women on this coast. They didn’t deserve to die. They deserved to be known.”
He says it with a reverence I was not prepared for, like the way a priest says the names of the dead.
For all our talking, I feel like I’m at an impasse again, with even more questions than answers. I’m still wet yet warm at the same time, and the whisky is going to my head, and the man across the fire is talking about dead women like he cared for them, and nothing makes any sense at all.
I should be afraid. I have been afraid, off and on, for weeks.
Yet I’m not afraid now and I can’t explain it.
I take another sip of the whisky.
Hmmm. Maybe it’s the booze.
“You haven’t asked me why I came…” I trail off, running my fingers over the blanket’s faded embroidery.
“What does it matter? I’m just grateful that you did. I don’t want to interrogate the grace.”
“That’s a hell of a sentence,” I reply, biting back a smile.
“Aye.”
A log pops loudly on the fire, the sound filling the room. I’m starting to feel like time is standing still in this place, holding me in place by a current I have to fight against in order to keep talking.
“I came to ask you to be honest with me—”
“—And I’ve been as honest as I can be tonight.”
“That’s not the same as actually being honest, though.”
“No. But it’s what I can give, foxglove.”
Despite myself, I can’t help but smile. “You know my name is Iris. Foxglove is just another flower.”
“You deserve to be named after all the flowers,” he insists in his rough brogue.
We stare at each other for a moment as I take in the beauty of his face, the slight cleft to his chin, the cut of his jaw, the mouth that’s both hard and soft at the same time, those eyes that pierce through the dimness with an intensity that rivals the fire.
Who are you? I think, as I have been asking myself this since the day I first saw him.
What are you?
“I should go,” I declare. “While I’m still capable of it.”
He doesn’t ask me to stay, which is kinda worse.
He stands when I stand. He carefully takes the velvet blanket from my shoulders, folds it once, and lays it over the back of his reading chair.
Then he walks me to the door.
In the hall, before the door, he stops.
He turns to me, and before I know what’s happening, his hand comes up. He cups my face with one hand—palm flat against my cheek, fingers light along my jaw—and he holds me there. He doesn’t pull me toward him. He doesn’t lean down, or try to kiss me. He just holds me and looks at me, like someone who is trying to memorize someone in case they don’t come back.
And his eyes…his eyes are wet.
I almost miss it. The firelight catches one of them; there is a brightness there that has nothing to do with the fire, and his throat moves once before he speaks
“I have waited a long time for a Galloway to knock on this door. If you come back,” he says thickly, “come back knowing what you are doing, and what you truly want with me. And I will tell you what I want with you.”
He lets my face go, my skin feeling impossibly cold without his touch while buzzing with electricity that seems to flood my whole body.
He opens the door.
I step over the threshold and the rain is still falling, the courtyard is silver in it. I walk back across the flagstones with the velvet of his hand still on my cheek, and my breath caught somewhere behind my collarbone, and I don’t look back until I am at the gateway.