It did not entirely surprise him that she knew the name, but hearing it in her small voice tightened something in him all the same.
“Aye,” Iona answered. “It was.”
Jamie considered this, her brows drawing together. “Because she wanted to hurt me.”
Iona’s mouth softened with pain and pride at once. “Because she wanted control. And because I had helped women she had harmed. I feared that if she found us, she would use ye to punish me.”
The child looked down at the grass for a moment, digesting that in the quiet, unadorned way children sometimes did when given a truth they could not yet hold all at once.
“So ye ran?”
“Aye,” Iona said.
“And Da didnae ken?”
Frederick answered that himself. “Nay. I didnae ken then.”
Jamie’s gaze lifted to him. “But if ye had kent, ye would have helped us.” The certainty in her voice cut through him.
“Aye, lass,” he said. “I would have.”
She blinked hard once. Then again. When she spoke next, her voice had grown unsteady in spite of her obvious determination to keep it otherwise.
“Ye both did a great deal for me.”
Iona reached, at once, for her hand, but Jamie leaned into both of them at once, all awkward limbs and fierce feeling, and Frederick opened his arm instinctively to make room.
“I am sorry ye had to be afraid,” Jamie whispered. “And I am glad ye found each other. And me.”
Ariella made a small sound somewhere behind them that might have been laughter, pressed hard against tears. Caitlin had gone suspiciously quiet. Even Lennox, who usually found sentiment an invitation to mischief, said nothing at all.
Frederick held his daughter closer and looked over her bent head toward the loch, toward the land that might one day hold a house of her own if she wished it, toward the place where fear no longer ruled them.
“We found our way,” he said quietly.
Jamie nodded against him as though that answered everything.
Perhaps, for now, it did.
Jamie’s arms remained looped around both of them for a moment longer before she finally pulled back, wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand in a way that tried very hard to look practical rather than emotional.
“I am nae cryin’,” she announced.
“Aye,” Caitlin said from the blanket behind them, with all the dignity of a woman who had herself grown suspiciously bright-eyed. “And I am nae listening.”
Jamie frowned at her grandmother, then turned at once toward Frederick and Iona as though daring either of them to disagree.
Iona only smiled and brushed a hand over her daughter’s hair.
The moment softened after that. Maxwell took the babe from Ariella so she could sit more comfortably. Lennox finally surrendered to whatever conspiracy Caitlin had been building in whispers and helped spread another blanket farther toward the shade. Erin, done blessing the edges of the land or perhaps onlypausing in it, returned with the look of a woman satisfied that the ground had heard her properly.
For a little while, the afternoon became simple again.
They ate. Jamie asked whether a future house built here might have room for three dogs, a pony, and perhaps a swing if one argued convincingly enough. Ariella laughed when the babe in Maxwell’s arms yawned so widely it seemed impossible the child’s face might recover from it. Lennox claimed he would rather sleep in a ditch than in a village overrun with children. Caitlin informed him no one had suggested he be invited at all.
Iona sat within it all and felt, with that same quiet astonishment that had followed her for weeks now, how settled happiness could be when no one snatched at it.
Frederick had been quieter than the others, though not withdrawn. There was a difference to him when he was planning something. She knew it now. A deeper stillness. A look in his eyes that meant his thoughts were measuring farther ahead than anyone else had yet realized. She had noticed it while Jamie spoke. While Ariella teased. While Caitlin corrected the arrangement of cups on the blanket for no reason other than habit.