An Echo in the Bone (Outlander, #7)

by Diana Gabaldon

The body is amazingly plastic. The spirit, even more so. But there are some things you don’t come back from. Say ye so, a nighean? True, the body’s easily maimed, and the spirit can be crippled—yet there’s that in a man that is never destroyed.

I hadn’t thought of—let alone said—“Soul Leading” in many years, and stumbled awkwardly through the words. Ian spoke it without hesitation, though, and I wondered how often he had used it through those years. The words seemed puny and powerless, swallowed among the sounds of hay rustling and beasts chewing. But I felt a tiny bit of comfort for having said them. Perhaps it was only that the sense of reaching out to something larger than yourself gives you some feeling that there is something larger—and there really has to be, because plainly you aren’t sufficient to the situation. I surely wasn’t.

Trust Bree, he thought wryly, to walk straight up to the elephant in the room and grab it by the trunk. She hadn’t said a word since their return about his near-ordination, or what he proposed to do now about his calling. Not a word, during their year in America, Mandy’s surgery, their decision to move to Scotland, the months of renovation after they’d bought Lallybroch—not until he’d opened the door. Once opened, of course, she’d walked straight through it, knocked him over, and planted a foot on his chest.

Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Ian raised a brow, looked from me to Jamie, and shook his head. “Nay wonder ye’re sae fond of her, Uncle. She must be a rare comfort to ye.” “Well,” Jamie said, his eyes fixed on his work, “she keeps takin’ me in—so I suppose she must be home.”

He’d made it clear that Ian was going back to Scotland, whether he did it willingly or tied in a sack.

“Catholics don’t believe in divorce,” Bree had informed him once. “We do believe in murder. There’s always Confession, after all.”

“It’s too important. You don’t forget having a dad.” Bree’s eyes slid sideways, the blue of them no more than a spark in the firelight. “I thought … you were so young. You do remember your father?” Roger shook his head, the chambers of his heart clenching hard, grasping emptiness. “No,” he said softly, and bent his head, breathing in the scent of his daughter’s hair. “I remember yours.”

“Have ye ever been in the slightest doubt that I need ye?” he demanded. It took roughly half a second of thought to answer this. “No,” I replied promptly. “To the best of my knowledge, you needed me urgently the moment I saw you. And I haven’t had reason to think you’ve got any more self-sufficient since. What on earth happened to your forehead? Those look like tooth—” He lunged across the desk and kissed me before I could finish the observation.

“Do you see? I do not own this creature—would not, if I could. Its coming is a gift, which I accept with gratitude, but when it’s gone, there is no sense of abandonment or deprivation. I’m only glad to have had it for so long as it chose to remain.”