He would never forget the look of delight on Margot’s face. She’d fallen to her knees, laughing as a pair of them had climbed up onto her lap. Arran, too, went down on a knee beside her, and the two of them had remained in that small space with the pups, laughing together at their ungainly attempts to play and move. They had playfully named the five pups. She’d told him about a small dog she’d had as a child, one that she would dress in clothes the housekeeper made for her and take about the garden in a perambulator.

There were other moments like that—unguarded, easy, companionable moments when Arran had seen the promise of their union. Moments when he’d felt things for his beautiful wife he would not have thought were possible only weeks before. He’d seen another side of Margot, and he had loved her.

Margot clearly had not shared his optimistic vision. Why they’d argued so vehemently that day, he could no longer recall. He’d been gone for a few days, hunting red stags. He’d been tired and hungry, and what he recalled most vividly were the tears streaking her face, another round of tears he despised and was helpless to understand. “I want to go home,” she’d said flatly. “I don’t want to live here like this.”

“Aye, then, go. We’ll all be the better for it,” he’d snapped, and he’d stormed out of her room, furious with her, with himself.

But he hadn’t meant it.

Those were angry words, spoken in a moment of fury. He had let them disappear into thin air with so many other angry words. He’d been careless, thoughtless—because he had believed that as they had sworn to each other and to God that they would stride forward in conjugal fealty, somehow they would forge a path in spite of their many differences.

Jock told him she was leaving a day or two later, and Arran still didn’t believe it. He went about his tasks that morning, disbelieving. He told Jock to let her go if that was what she wanted, because he never believed she would.

Diah, what a fool.