She was everything, he realized suddenly, that Jean—whom he’d wanted to marry, who he’d believed cared for him—had never been. And for the first time since Jean had broken off their engagement, he was entirely free of her spell. As if scales had fallen from his eyes, he saw clearly how very different Jean’s conception of marriage had been from his. She had wanted a future that was protected and secure, accepted by society, applauded by her friends. A man in turmoil, his mind shattered, his future uncertain, was a terrifying prospect.

Fiona MacDonald knew what love meant, and what it cost, and what the war had taken from her. She would have loved Hamish if he’d come home scarred with burns, without his legs or his arms. She would have loved the man he’d become as well as the man he was.

She would even have loved him shell-shocked and consumed by nightmares—

Rutledge refused to follow that line of thought.

But his mind brought back other images, the women like Jean who came to the clinics and stared with horror at the ruins of husband or lover—he had once encountered one of them running out the door, face buried in her handkerchief, moaning in shock. And in the room behind her, a man with bandages where his face had been lay mute with clenched fists, unable to cry. There had been others who had accepted the living shell gratefully, with an intense sense of wonder that they had been among the lucky ones to have their soldier home again.

Fiona would have been among those. . . .

That was the kind of courage she possessed. Was she also a murderess?

Rutledge felt the betrayal even as his mind framed the question. A betrayal of Hamish and of Fiona MacDonald.

HE SHUT THE war out of his mind and tried to concentrate instead on what lay ahead.

Fiona had left her grandfather’s home and moved south to Brae.

But why Brae?

“Because it was different from the glen,” Hamish answered unexpectedly. “It held no memories. Of her grandfather, of me. Of her brothers who had died.”

Rutledge recalled the statement McKinstry had read to him. When she’d been asked if Fiona could have been pregnant when she left Brae, Mrs. Davison had answered unequivocally. “No. I would have known,” she’d said. “I kept a strict eye on Fiona—not because she was likely to find herself in trouble, but because she was a young girl, alone and in my care. Come to that, it wasn’t hard to do—she seldom took her day off, and even in the evenings, when the children were in bed, she’d sit with me and do the mending or read aloud.”

Oliver’s comment on Mrs. Davison’s character was “I’d take my oath that she’s telling the truth. Forthright to a fault, as my sergeant put it.”