Three days later, we returned to London on a gray morning that seemed to mirror my apprehension about meeting Damon's family. The private jet touched down at a small airfield outside the city, where a convoy of black Mercedes waited to transport us to what Damon called "the family seat."
During our time on Skye Island, something fundamental had shifted between us. The careful distance we had maintained since our wedding had dissolved into something warmer, more intimate, though we hadn't yet crossed the final physical boundaries that the mate bond demanded. We were learning each other—his preference for strong black coffee in the morning, my habit of reading by the window when I was nervous, the way he unconsciously touched the scar on his temple when he was thinking about difficult problems.
"Tell me about your grandmother," I said as London's countryside rolled past the tinted windows of our car.
