Isabella did not get to stay until the last dance of her wedding.

In the middle of the dancing, her new husband had disappeared. She was too busy being introduced to prominent bankers, businessmen, and lawyers with her father to notice that he was gone. Other than their first dance, she had not danced with him, and instead been networking and nursing a single glass of white wine for the better part of two hours. As she continued to accept congratulations on behalf of her and her husband, she began to wonder where he had gone off to.

"Go find him," her father finally instructed. "There is one Congressman I would like you to meet, and Jacob should meet him too."

With a polite smile and nod, she turned and went towards the large estate. With a quick glance around to see that no one was watching, she swallowed back the rest of her wine and set the empty glass on a tray a waiter was walking around with.

Sandy was looking for her inside. "Oh, there you are! Jake wants you upstairs in your room," she told her hurriedly.

Isabella nodded, hiking up the giant puffy white dress she was wearing and making her way up the grand staircase. It took her a few moments to get upstairs from the sheer weight of the dress and height of the heels. Mrs. Montgomery had designed it with Vera Wang, and it was a beautiful custom-made gown, but it was also extraordinarily heavy.

Jake's younger brother Tom opened the door as soon as she knocked. "Oh, there you are!"

"What's wrong?" she asked.

"Is that Isabella? Isabella, baby? Isabella, I need you."

Isabella exchanged a glance with Tom before pushing past him and going to the bathroom, where Jake was sitting on the ground, his head resting on the toilet seat. His college buddy, Bollig was next to him, smoking a cigar. The smoke had settled in the bathroom in a haze that made Isabella scrunch up her nose.

"I got it from here," she told him as he took a puff. "Go outside with Tom."

"That's why he loves you!" Bollig laughed, hoping off the sink where he had been perched. "See you later Jakey-boy!"

"Isabella," he mumbled in a groan. "Isabella, baby, I need you."

With a sigh, Isabella squatted down next to her pale husband. "I'm here," she said.

"God, you're still so hot," he breathed, looking over at her before closing his eyes. "I can't wait to get you out of the dress and into something nice and ti-"

His thought was interrupted by a bout of vomit pushing up his throat. "Toilet!" she cried, holding his head to make sure that he got it in the water and nowhere else in the beautiful white bathroom.

Jake was so drunk that he couldn't even hold up his own head she soon realized. With a heavy sigh, she kicked off her heels and tried to maneuver into a squat so that she could be low enough to hold up his heavy head as his stomach repelled its contents. Close as she was to him, she could smell the booze and cigar smoke that had settled on him.

"Did you notice that Madison didn't show up?" he commented in a slur after he stopped throwing up. "That fucking bastard."

Isabella didn't comment on the fact that the President of Harvard had not shown up.

Jake started hiccupping.

"Fuck I feel like shit," he muttered through the hiccups.

"How much did you have?" Isabella asked, her lips in a tight line.

"How the fuck am I suppose to know," he muttered, trying to drop his head against the toilet.

Isabella let out a sigh and settled onto the bathroom floor as he alternated between throwing up and complaining about various aspects of their wedding day that had not gone the way they were supposed to. "My steak was cold by the time I got it," he complained in a moan at one point.

Shortly after that, Isabella was fairly certain that he had nothing left to throw up and tried to get him to go into his giant four poster bed and get some sleep.

"No, no, no. Stop!" he refused. "I'm staying right here. Leave me the hell alone."

With another sigh, Isabella finally let him be, curled up on the bathroom floor in his expensive tux. She washed the heavy amounts of makeup off of her face and then tried to get out of her dress.

It was expertly laced and knotted and she couldn't reach where the knot was. With tears of frustration coming to her eyes, she couldn't bring herself to leave the room where everyone believed they were in newfound marital bliss to ask someone else to help her get out of the giant gown. And as much as she wiggled and twisted, she could not get out of the mass of white silk.

Eventually she settled down on the bed alone with her giant gown and closed her eyes, spending her wedding night in broken fits of sleep.

~O~

In the next few days, Isabella fell into a rhythm.

The days had begun with her waking from a restless sleep, hardly rested but stubborn enough to open her eyes and get on with the day. The Scots, in general, were a bit slower to rise than investment bankers on Wall Street and preferred to start their day well after 9am.

By the time she had showered and dressed, Edward would have breakfast cooked and waiting for her. He had got in the habit of having a mug of coffee in his hand, ready to hand to her when she entered the kitchen to sit down. She would take it with a grateful nod, and he would smile at her in return.

After breakfast they would get into his car and drive the brief distance over to the distillery. Edward would walk with her to the office, which had begun to look like a war room of sorts and leave her there with an offer to assist her and an uncertain nod when she politely declined the offer.

The process would be reversed around dinner time when they left for the day.

While there was a semblance of routine, she still felt off-balance.

Their wedding night had succeeded in stirring up emotions and thoughts which had been so easy for her to bury and keep buried.

The window in the office had a view of the loch that the distillery was on. It was a small enough lake that if there was not a lot of wind, it was still and would reflect the highlands surrounding it. More than a few times she had gotten caught staring out to the water, getting lost.

She was resoundingly and horribly stuck.

She was being pushed so harshly into the past, into memories that grew darker the more she pondered them. They were holding her hostage, not allowing her to do anything other than relive and reconsider so much of what she had thought was certain.

On the other side of the coin, there was a lure, a pull – to the now, and to the future. On her wedding night, dancing and drinking with friends and family she had never met, she had been content – so content that it took her breath away to consider.

There was a pull to the lively British woman and her husband and son.

There was a pull to the boisterous cousins who she could hear down the hallway, greeting the few guests.

There was a pull to the man who looked at her with kind eyes and constantly tried to make sure she had everything she needed and was fed.

There was a pull to the night they had shared, drunk or not.

But the push was just as strong and much darker.

It was a constant battle in her mind, a battle she felt a spectator to, rather than a general with any control.

The battle overwhelmed her, consumed her energy, and left her paralyzed.

At night, alone in her bed, the push won every time. It shoved her into the past so hard that she felt whiplash.

And it made her so angry.

Hot, furious tears leaked out of her eyes more nights than not because she was powerless to stop the onslaught from her life and because she did not want to think of all that she had been.

Away from it all, all of the money and all of the greed, she could see clearly.

And as she examined what had been her life, she was mad.

She had not been all of the woman she had so desperately wanted to be.

Not the woman she planned to be. Not the woman she was raised to be.

It got hard to breathe when she dwelled on this line of thought too much.

What would her grandparents have said?

The thought echoed and rippled across the battle day in and day out.

The reason it got hard to breathe is because she knew what they would have said.

And she had never disappointed them while they were alive.

It was hard to realize she had done it in their death.

Despite all of the chaos she was regularly paralyzed with, she attempted to bury herself into the work, and at times, she was quite successful. Hours would pass as she lost herself in all of the documents that told the story of the Scotch distillery and the moon would chase the sun away before she could even notice.

However, she still felt as if she had made no progress.

On Friday, marking the one-week anniversary of her arrival on the Isle of Skye, there was a knock on the office door around lunch time.

"Come in," she called when it was clear the knock was asking permission rather than a warning that the door was about to be opened.

Edward walked in with a decently sized cardboard takeaway box in his hands.

"Ye'll remember the advice I got about it being good practice to keep yer wife fed," he said sheepishly, holding out the container.

Isabella rubbed at her template tiredly but was powerless to resist giving him a smile.

Edward came over to the desk and set the container in front of her. Curious, she opened it. An entire array of seafood greeted her: mussels, scallops, crab, oysters, prawns, and what looked to be smoked salmon. It was so full that a prawn fell onto the desk upon her opening it.

"I was no sure if you liked seafood or no," he said, rubbing the back of his neck as he gestured to the food. "If ye prefer something else, it's no a problem."

"Thank you," she replied. "This looks wonderful."

Edward nodded and then turned to leave.

A small sound of protest slipped out of her lips, making him turn and face her in confusion.

"This is too much food for one person!" she exclaimed before she could help herself.

Edward blinked in surprise.

"Ah, well," he started, "Ye are so tiny I figured ye could use it."

Ignoring the urge to consider whether or not he was right, she raised an eyebrow. "Did whoever gave you the advice about keeping your wife fed mention anything about keeping comments about her weight to yourself?"

A slow smirk spread across Edward's face.

"No, they must have forgot to mention that one," he allowed.

Isabella looked pointedly at the food and then at the chair in front of the desk.

It was a matter of mere moments before Edward was sitting in the chair in front of her and they had silently but mutually established which area of the container was for shells and the inedible parts of the seafood. Isabella knew she was hogging the prawns and avoiding the oysters, but Edward didn't seem to mind, easily scooping up the latter.

Their silence was companionable as they ate. Isabella was completely enjoying the food and the reprieve the distraction had provided her and didn't even notice Edward's eyes wandering around the desk.

"Ooch!" he grunted in that odd Scottish noise. "That is yer to-do list?"

Isabella followed his gaze to the sheet of paper that she had started writing in the margins of and winced. When she looked at him, there was a stubbornness in his eyes.

"Surely there is something I can do to be of use, Bella."

Isabella bit into the scallop, not immediately replying.

While she admired him and certainly admired the whisky he produced, she was wary of his usefulness related to anything requiring a sense of business acumen.

As if reading her mind, he replied, "Something that does not involve configuring cash flow."

Isabella took the second bite of the scallop and then wiped her fingers on one of the brown napkins on the nearby stack. She glanced down at her list and then up at him, seeing the determined expression in his eyes.

In the past few days, Edward had grown quieter around her. She may have been caught up in all that she was dealing with, but she was still a keen observer. He still smiled and made sure she was fed at any given time, but his attempts to draw her into conversation had become sparse in nature. She worried it was because of how poor of a conversationalist she had been lately.

Upon seeing his determined glance and concluding that she had no conceivable reason to push him to any further unhappiness, she conceded.

"I need to sort all of that," she said, looking at the two boxes that were jammed to the brim with documents. "Not only by year but by the type of statement, whether it be an expense for the supplies or a bank statement or even a supplier invoice from one of the wholesalers. I skimmed it and there was no rhyme or reason to any of it."

"Well," Edward reasoned evenly, "I do suppose that is my mess to clean up."

When Isabella had nothing to say in response, Edward picked up a mussel. Before plopping it into his mouth looked at her seriously, saying, "I will help ye with whatever ye need, Bella."

A few hours into their afternoon, Jasper appeared with two glasses of whisky. "Hey boss man – and boss lady," he added with a grin and a nod to Isabella. "Da said if yer doing office work that I should bring ye this."

Edward smirked but took the proffered glass. When he turned to Isabella and saw that she was about to refuse, he stopped her. "He thought ye might no be inclined and told me to remind you of the magical properties whisky has to…to get the creative juices going."

Isabella raised her eyebrows and looked at him and his earnest grin. With a roll of her eyes, she held out of her hand for the dram. Her grandfather had said some similar exaggeration about the usefulness of whisky, and it made her smile to think of it.

As he was finishing his dram and working at making sense of the hundreds of random papers in front of him, Edward started humming. Isabella looked up in surprise when the noise started, but he didn't see her and continued to hum while he worked.

After a few minutes Isabella offered with a wry grin, "You can put on some music if you would like."

Edward looked up, startled.

"Oh? Och, I'm sorry. Dinnae even realize I was doing it."

Isabella nodded at the radio in the corner of the room. "I don't mind."

"Ah, awright then, if ye like."

The BBC Gaelic radio filled the room as they worked, playing a mix of new and old music, some of which Isabella recognized and most of which she was unfamiliar with. Truth be told, she wasn't paying much attention to the music, so absorbed she was with her thoughts as she worked.

As had become a habit for her, she would occasionally glance out to the lake as it always reminded her of home, of summers with her grandparents on the nearby lake. She didn't even realize she had gotten so caught up in thinking about them until she recognized that there was extra noise in the office.

Edward was singing.

He was tapping his fingers on the side of the filing box, singing quietly and with an embellished Scottish accent along with The Proclaimers as he stared at the document in front of him.

"I would walk 500 miles and I walk 500 more, just to be the man that…"

Suddenly he trailed off when he noticed that she was looking in his direction.

"Oh," he said, stretching out the "ooo" in the short word. "Sorry," he apologized.

Isabella grinned slightly. "Don't stop on my account."

He didn't immediately start singing again and instead had a shy smile on his face. "Every barin born in Scotland kens that song."

"Don't Stop Believing in America is the same way."

"Aye?" he asked.

"Aye," she said, a playful and shy grin on her face.

The chorus came back around and Edward joined the Scottish singers with a grin. "Just to be the man that walked a thousand miles…"

Isabella couldn't stop the laugh that left her mouth as he continued to embellish his Scottish accent to sing. Edward looked at her in a pleased sort of surprise when he heard the laugh and quickly turned his eyes back to the box but continued to sing with just a little bit more enthusiasm as he picked up another stack.

When the "Da da da – da da da" call and response started, Isabella had to discreetly cover her mouth, as he shifted from side to side, singing each the call and the response with a wiggling of his head and shoulders. His lips were quirked up into a smile as he sang, encouraged by the sweet sound of her quiet giggles.

Following The Proclaimers, several older, more traditional songs came on. Much to her surprise, Edward hummed along with many of them, clearly recognizing the melody. He sang along with all of the words to "I Belong to Glasgow," again swaying his head back and forth as he did so.

Isabella tried not to stare, but the way he sang from his belly and embellished his Scottish accent was surprisingly charming, not to mention entertaining.

If he minded her attention, he did not say so.

"But when I get a couple of drinks on a Saturday, Glasgow belongs to meeeeee."

"Maw loved that song," he explained once the strands of the song faded into a broadcaster's voice. "This whole bloody station actually. It was always on around the house, used to drive me crazy."

"She was from Glasgow, right?"

Edward nodded. "Aye. Not only was she from there, but she used to sing that song to my da, saying she belonged to Glasgow, whether she liked it or not."

"And he left Skye for her?" she surmised.

Edward smiled fondly.

"Aye," he replied conspiringly, "I dinnae think anything less than Maw could have moved him from Skye. But he would ha' done anything for her." A wistful smile came over his face as he thought about his parents.

Isabella smiled too.

"Maw knew it too," he added, "told Collette to never settle for anything less in a lad."

The smile did not immediately fade from Isabella's face, but she felt the urge to frown.

The man across from her had been brought up in a family with parents that adored each other. He likely had plans and dreams of the family he would have, based on the way he spoke about them. And here she was, once again feeling horribly unworthy, not really fitting into those dreams and not really even remembering her own dreams.

Long ago, they had been similar to his, she was sure of it.

She had wanted a love like the love she saw between her grandparents.

She had wanted that household filled with laughter and warmth.

But somewhere along the way, she had lost that.

A different look into a wedding night that seemed charming in the previous chapter.

Small conversations, small steps forward?

All of my love and gratitude to you for following along in this tale.