An Echo in the Bone (Outlander, #7)

by Diana Gabaldon

Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

The hilt of the knife was still warm in my hand, but a small chill went through me. With rare exceptions, Jamie wasn’t given to purely romantic gestures. If he gave me a knife, he thought I’d need it. And not for digging up roots and hacking tree bark, either. Know its purpose, indeed. “It fits my hand,” I said, looking down and stroking the small groove that fit my thumb. “How did you know to make it so exactly?” He laughed at that. “I’ve had your hand round my cock often enough to know the measure of your grip, Sassenach,” he assured me. I snorted briefly in response to this, but turned the blade and pricked the end of my own thumb with the point. It was amazingly sharp; I scarcely felt it, but a bead of dark-red blood welled up at once. I put the knife into my belt, took his hand, and pressed my thumb to his. “Blood of my blood,” I said. I didn’t make romantic gestures, either.

ever you find yourself in the midst of paradox, you can be sure you stand on the edge of truth,” his adoptive father had told him once. “You may not know what it is, mind,” he’d added with a smile. “But it’s there.”

“They’re girls,” she replied briefly. “They were born in danger and will live their lives in that condition, regardless of circumstance.”

Do you think he’s still alive—Mr. Willoughby?” He considered that, sipping. “Aye, I do. A man who escaped from a Chinese emperor and sailed halfway round the world to keep his balls is one wi’ a good deal of determination.”

“When a man dies, it’s only him,” he said. “And one is much like another. Aye, a family needs a man, to feed them, protect them. But any decent man can do it. A woman …” His lips moved against my fingertips, a faint smile. “A woman takes life with her when she goes. A woman is … infinite possibility.”

It was possible to leave things behind—places, people, memories—at least for a time. But places held tight to the things that had happened in them, and to come again to a place you had once lived was to be brought face-to-face with what you had done there and who you had been.

All loss is one, and one loss becomes all, a single death the key to the gate that bars memory.

Like forgiveness, it was not a thing once learned and then comfortably put aside but a matter of constant practice—to accept the notion of one’s own mortality, and yet live fully, was a paradox worthy of Socrates.