Turning the creature in his hands, giving her the softest squeeze, unable to resist the urge to give it the quickest sniff (which made his family laugh again), his eyes melted into the softest of full moons.
‘She’s exactly how I remember her,’ said Jamie. ‘Thank you.’
All through this exchange, Mr Beaton stood still as a statue, his lips buttoned together.
‘That’s not all,’ said Ally.
‘Hmm?’ Jamie was looking the cow directly in the face with childlike innocence.
‘I repaired the voice chip,’ she said.
‘Voice chip?’ Jamie looked from Ally to his sister and dad. Both shrugged back.
‘It speaks?’ said Karolyn. ‘I don’t remember that.’
‘The speaker’s been gummed up for some time. Maybe you all forgot?’
‘Oh, my,’ said Jamie’s dad in a rush. ‘It’s coming back to me now.’ He brought his knuckles to his mouth. He looked afraid.
‘You can squeeze it, there,’ Ally told Jamie softly, ‘where you feel the wee hard thing? That’s it.’
Ally watched Jamie’s fingers move around the fat little cow’s belly until he struck upon the button. He had that same look she’d seen the other night, as they approached the Nithy Brig, of a person who was at once desperate to remember some locked away thing and at the same time terrified of what they might discover.
‘It’s OK,’ Ally whispered.
Jamie pressed the button in the deepest of silences and a voice bloomed in the air.
‘Mummy loves you, my darlin’, happy holiday.’
A sharp hitch in his breath, the kind that becomes sniffs and then silent tears, shook at Jamie’s ribs.
Karolyn’s mouth fell open in amazement. She put her hand to the toy, now clutched tightly to her brother’s body.
Roz and Ally let their tears well through their gladness, and McIntyre pushed his glasses up onto his head so he could pinch at his eyes.
The three repairers hugged each other close and watched on as a family were, to some small degree, re-united.
Only, what came next, nobody expected.
Jamie Beaton’s father, Samuel, once big and broad, now wiry and hunched, a man of few words and even fewer smiles, the man who had taken on the hardest of tasks – one he’d never believed he was fit for – a man who never once thought about his own grief, prioritising his two heartbroken children, reached for the silly toy in his son and daughter’s hands and joined them in pressing the button once more.
When Lucy Jayne Beaton’s voice trilled out loud in the room once again, he opened his eyes to the ceiling, his lips twisting apart, and he let out a hard sob that had been waiting to escape for twenty-three summers and he sobbed and cried and laughed and clung hard to his children.
The McIntyres didn’t have to look at one another to know it was best to leave them to this moment, so they took their own feelings out into the front yard to share together, convinced more than ever that this work was the most worthwhile thing they could be doing with their spare time.
‘Well done,’ Roz said as she hugged her daughter. ‘Good job, Ally McIntyre, you clever thing.’
When the Beatons eventually emerged from the repair shed, there was a good deal of hugging and hand shaking and a great outpouring of thanks, and the McIntyres happily waved the family away and made their way into the mill house.
‘We’d better be on our way,’ Samuel Beaton said to his son, bestowing Holiday back into his hands, still standing in the gravel of the repair shed courtyard. ‘It’s a long drive to Edinburgh and the roads’ll be busy with the weekend traffic.’
‘You’re going already?’ Jamie hadn’t been prepared for this. ‘Can’t you stay for dinner, or something…’
Karolyn already knew what her brother wasn’t willing to accept. That their dad had been exposed to a lot of unprocessed feelings in that repair shop, and he was deep in flight mode, wanting to get back to his safe space where nothing ever got talked about.
‘I’ll take care of him,’ Karolyn said, as their dad left the yard through the gap in the wall, making for the hotel car park where their bags were already in the boot of the car.
‘We could have had dinner, talked a bit more. I didn’t get a chance to say any of the things I wanted to, what with me working so much, then I was helping rally the town all day yesterday. I’ve got these photographs I wanted to show him, you see? It was just never the right time this week, but now…’
