He made a small Scottish sound in the back of his throat; I couldn’t tell what he meant by it. He dropped the last handful of mangled shell into the basin and looked up to meet my eyes.

“Can I trust him, do ye think?” The clouded sky was still bright, and he was dark against it, wisps of hair flying free around his head. I shivered briefly, and my stomach shrank with the absurd but absolute conviction that someone was standing behind me.

“What do you mean?” I was on edge, and it showed in my voice. “You did trust him, didn’t you? With—us. Me and Brianna.”

“I hadn’t a choice about that, aye? Now I do.” He straightened, rubbing his palms together, and the last fragments of peanut skin whirled away in the strengthening wind.

I drew a deep breath to keep my voice from shaking, and brushed bits of shell off my bodice. “Now you do? You mean you’re wondering whether you can believe what he wrote in that book?”

“I am.”

“He was an historian,” I said firmly, refusing to turn my head and look behind me. “He wouldn’t—he couldn’t—falsify anything, any more than Roger could change what’s in the Bible. Or you tell me a deliberate lie.”

“And you of all people ken what history is,” he said bluntly, and stood up, knees cracking. “As for lying … everyone does that, Sassenach, if not often. I’ve certainly done it.”

“Not to me,” I said. It wasn’t a question and he didn’t answer it.

“Fetch a bowl, aye?”

He picked up the basin and moved out into the yard, where the wind caught at his shirt and belled the cloth out behind him. The clouds were boiling up behind the mountains, and the smell of rain was sharp on the wind. It wouldn’t be long.

I stood, feeling very strange, and turned. The front door was standing open, empty, its canvas covering pushed aside. I felt the wind whoosh past me, moving in my skirts, and heard it go down the hall and into the rooms before me, rattling the small glass jars in my surgery, flapping papers in Jamie’s study.

On my way to the kitchen, I glimpsed Frank’s book, lying on the table in Jamie’s study, and on impulse—glancing involuntarily over my shoulder, though I was quite alone—I stepped in.

The Soul of a Rebel: The Scottish Roots of the American Revolution. By Franklin W. Randall, PhD.

Jamie had left the book open, facedown. He never treated books like that. He would use anything for a bookmark—leaves, bird’s feathers, a hair ribbon … once I had opened a book he was reading to find the small dried body of a skink that someone had stepped on. But he always closed a book, careful of the binding.

Frank stared up at me from the back cover, calm and inscrutable. I touched his face, very gently, through the clear plastic cover, with a feeling of distant grief, regret mingled with—why not be honest now? There was no need to keep secrets from myself—relief. It was finished.