Page 28 of Death at a Highland Wedding

I wrinkle my nose. “Mostly? Catriona’s brogue is thicker. Yours sounds about seventy-five percent like a modern city-bred Scottish accent. I could usually understand those, mostly because of my nan. The country ones are tougher. Catriona’s sounds like what I’d think of as country. Same as Alice or Simon or Jack. More regional.”

“More pure Scot. Less influenced by the English.”

“Possibly. I remember watching old movies from the forties and fifties, and the Americans all sounded vaguely British. Turns out that was something actors affected in that period to sound more cultured.”

“They sounded English, you mean. Not British.”

“Right. Sorry. Someday, I will stop doing that. It’s like lumping Canadians in with Americans. Never appreciated.” I lift my whisky. “Here’s to living in countries annoyingly overshadowed by their more famous neighbors.”

He clinks my glass and then pauses. “However, in my case, we are under English rule.”

“Well, technically, my country stopped being a colony only a few years ago, and we won’t gain our full governing independence for another hundred years. Even then, we’re still part of the Commonwealth, which means we recognize an English monarch, at least symbolically.” I sigh. “It’s taking a very long time to snip those apron strings.”

He hefts his class. “To the demise of British colonialism. Whichwillend…” He looks at me.

“Uh, someday?”

He sighs, deeply enough to make me laugh.

I take a chunk of roast ham and lean back to stare up at the sky before I surrender and flop onto my back. “So many stars.”

“Which is one thing we have that you do not, yes? Well, you have stars. You simply cannot see them.”

“Not in the city.”

He stretches onto one elbow. The movement is slow enough to make me smile. Not that he minds getting his clothes grass-stained—after all, he isn’t the one to clean them. But it’s like using muscles creaky from disuse, as if he isn’t quite sure how to stretch out on the ground anymore, much less flop down on his back, like I had.

Once he’s on his elbow, he shifts before finally easing onto his back.

“They truly are glorious,” he says.

“Billions and billions of stars. All light-years away.”

“And a light-year is how far?”

I twist to look over at him. “Detective. Not astrophysicist.”

He smiles, and we resume our stargazing.

After a few minutes he says, his voice soft, “Are you still happy here, Mallory?”

I don’t answer too quickly. That would ring false. Instead, I take a moment to find the sincerity he needs. “I am.”

“And you know that if you were not…”

I tilt my head his way. “You don’t need to keep checking, Duncan. I’m a big girl who wouldn’t hesitate to try going back if this wasn’t what I wanted. But I haven’t questioned it for a moment.”

I resist the urge to add in a joke, maybe that Ihavequestioned it when I had to peel back a corpse’s skin and hold it for an hour. Even joking would make him fret.

“I’m here,” I say. “I’m staying here.”

He nods and looks up at the sky. More minutes of comfortable silence pass. Then he says, “There is something I wanted to speak to you about.”

I glance over, but he’s still looking up. “Okay.”

“Since you are staying, I wanted to discuss… That is, I wanted to ask…”

He trails off, and I’m about to nudge when he clears his throat and blurts, “My mother will be home this summer.”