He laughed, a hollow, broken sound. “Did I? Or did the stones teach you, and I was merely the fool who followed?”
This is the cruelty we did not anticipate, I thought. We survived Culloden. We survived the stones, the witch trials, the ocean. But we did not survive the quiet horror of our own child carrying a flag against us.
I tied off the suture. “He will be confused. There is a difference.”
“I have killed men,” he said, his voice a low rumble, like distant thunder. “Englishmen. Frenchmen. My own kin, in a way. But I have never felt a blade turn in my gut until I saw him ride past at Ticonderoga. He has my face, Sassenach. And he looked at me as if I were a stranger.”
“I lied to him every day of his life,” Jamie whispered. “I let him think he was an orphan. I let him grow up in a house where his own father—the man who raised him—was a lie. And now he has seen my face on a battlefield. He will think I am a ghost. Or a demon. Or worse… a disappointment.”
“Aye. And when he does, he will hate me.”
I took his hand—the one that had held the dirk, the plow, the pen that wrote love letters to me across two centuries.
“You are none of those things,” I said. “You are a man who made an impossible choice to keep him safe. And one day, he will understand. Not today. Perhaps not even this year. But time… time has a way of folding back on itself, Jamie. You taught me that.”
