Page 2 of I Loved You Then (Far From Home #12)
Ruins she’d known.
She folded her hands in her lap, staring at the rings on the finger of her left hand.
Five years married. Ten years together. Long enough to accumulate a house, furniture, and routines—and at least one side chick, apparently— and short enough that her mother assured her, You’re young, you’ll move on.
And yet here they were, crossing an ocean for a last attempt neither of them really believed in.
Not for the first time, she thought that she should have followed her gut ten years ago, back when they were still only dating, when the doubts had already been whispering that Jason wasn’t the one for her or she for him, not in the way she needed.
But after the car accident, he’d been there for her.
She could not deny that. For six long weeks while she lay in the hospital, broken and mending, Jason had shown up—every day, steady and attentive, holding her hand, speaking words she had wanted so badly to believe.
In those fragile weeks, his presence had assured her of his love, and his commitment.
And in truth, it had been good for a while.
She was sure it had been love, she told herself; it must have been, or she’d never have married him.
But it was hard to remember now, hard to summon what she’d once felt beside the hollowness that filled her in the present.
Up until about six months ago, she almost believed she could love him again, that the marriage was salvageable.
Instead, it seemed they both carried ghosts into every room.
She knew exactly who his was—she had a name, a face, a perfume Claire had caught on the collar of his shirt one rainy Saturday morning while doing laundry.
And she suspected he wished, even now, that it were that other woman in the seat beside him, not his wife.
Jason had been the one to fight hardest against divorce.
Not for her, not for them, but for himself.
He couldn’t bear the idea of failure, of being a man who hadn’t held his marriage together.
What he wanted, Claire had come to realize, was not a partner but a compliant, silent wife, someone who wouldn’t question him and wouldn’t interfere in his life outside their home.
“Where to next?” Jason asked, eyes on the road.
God, when was the last time he looked at her, really looked and saw her?
“The abbey ruins,” she said. “I read about them—”
He exhaled sharply. “Another pile of rocks.”
Here, she knew, she was expected to concede, to read between his lines and understand he didn’t want to go, and she was meant to surrender, to spare them open conflict. Those days were long gone.
“We said we’d stop,” she reminded him calmly. “I’m not spending every day, all day, in pubs.”
Fifteen minutes later, when they pulled off the road near what was essentially a pile of rocks, Jason looked through the windshield skeptically at the gray stone. “Fifteen minutes, all right?”
Claire ignored him and his directive, looking out again at the Highlands as she stepped out of the car, letting the beauty of it rush in. She wanted to feel something real. She wanted to breathe, to remember who she was before betrayal, before mistrust, before the slow death of love.
Scotland, at least, made her feel .
The truth was, she suspected that being with Jason had never truly been good for her—not even in the beginning, when she’d convinced herself it was.
Even at its best, their relationship had pressed her to be someone she wasn’t.
She hadn’t grown into the woman she wanted to become; she had grown into the woman Jason wanted beside him.
All those years, she had measured her words, softened her edges, tucked away the restless pieces of herself until she hardly recognized what was left.
The only place she still felt like herself was at work.
At the hospital, she was competent, respected, and encouraged.
She mattered. She made a difference as a nurse.
And the contrast only made it more clear how small she had allowed herself to become everywhere else, living in and as Jason’s shadow.
Shaking off her melancholy—something she’d been forced to do often over the past four days in Scotland, Claire approached the ruins.
The abbey sat half-swallowed by the earth, its roof long since collapsed, its walls jagged teeth against the sky.
Claire stood at the edge of the ruins and felt a rush of something that had nothing to do with the wind tugging at her jacket.
Reverence, maybe. Or the sense that history pressed close here, the air weighted with all the lives that had passed through this place.
Her mother had always said she was an old soul, that she’d been born in the wrong century.
Inside the broken walls, moss blanketed the stones where monks or nuns once prayed, and weeds sprouted between the cracks.
Claire trailed her fingers along a column, its grooves worn smooth by centuries of weather, and let her breath slow.
She wished she could share the moment, wished her husband could feel what she did.
But when she glanced back, he was scrolling through his phone as he walked, uninterested, toward the ruins, barely looking up.
Or rather, she corrected herself, she wished she was sharing this with someone else.
She moved on alone, following the outline of what had once been the nave. She could almost hear the echo of chants, the low hum of voices rising together.
“Claire.”
She turned. Jason was holding his phone out, showing a call coming in, too far for her to see the caller ID. “It’s work. I need to take this.”
“On vacation?”
“Emergency,” he said shortly.
She didn’t bother to protest more, didn’t care enough to do so, actually. Anyway, his gaze had already shifted away, his voice dropping as he walked back toward the car. Work—or her, the other woman, Darcy.
Claire turned from him and crossed into the chancel, where the last shards of stained glass clung to their frames. A wash of light poured through, muted but colored faintly red and gold and green.
She closed her eyes, standing in the broken heart of the abbey.
The air carried only wind and a breath of dampness.
Crows circled high above, below blue-gray clouds.
For a fleeting moment, she let herself pretend the walls stood whole, that voices rose in prayer, that the silence was reverent and not ruinous.
Hmph, just as she’d been pretending in her marriage for years.
She laughed internally at her snarky comparison— a silence reverent and not ruinous , rather poetic if she did say so herself.
The wind seemed suddenly to shift and then it stilled altogether, so starkly that Claire was aware of it immediately.
Goosebumps rose on her arms and along the back of her neck.
The air pressed close around her, heavy and charged, and at the same time the ground seemed to hum beneath her feet.
Not a sound exactly, but a vibration she felt in her bones, as though something vast and unseen had turned its attention her way.
“Jason?” she called, though she dared not move but didn’t know why she held herself so rigidly.
It was just weird, whatever feeling just passed through her, or was in the air around her. Like, how often was she aware of air? But now she was.
Jason didn’t answer her, and she could no longer hear the distant murmur of his conversation on that phone call.