‘I’ll start, shall I? Tell him it’s an intervention?’ he suggested.
She shifted uncomfortably on the edge of the sofa seat. ‘You can’t use the word intervention. He’ll run a mile. Just say we’ve been concerned… oh God, he’s coming now.’
Jamie watched as she broke into a smile. ‘Hi, Dad, come and sit down a minute.’ She patted the spot beside her. ‘Jamie’s here too.’
His dad lurched into shot, looking more than a little confused. He was still holding his newspaper and pint of semi-skimmed.
‘Aye? What’s all this in aid of?’ He obediently sat down, just as Jamie knew he would.
‘Well, we’re…’ Karolyn began, before tailing off. ‘We’ve been…’
‘This is an intervention,’ Jamie blurted like he was reading someone their rights.
‘Jamie!’ Karolyn protested.
‘A whit?’ said Samuel Beaton, even more perplexed.
‘Listen, Dad,’ Jamie softened. ‘You know how I’m coming home on the ninth, just as soon as I complete my required volunteer hours here?’
‘I do, aye.’ He waited expectantly.
‘And you know how things have been…’ he paused so he could swallow, ‘since Mum passed?’
Samuel glanced from the screen to Karolyn then back to his son.
‘We’ve been talking, and it’s time a few things changed,’ Jamie went on bravely.
‘Moved on,’ suggested Karolyn, ‘a wee bit.’
Mr Beaton’s face remained hangdog. His eyes had the glisten of tears behind them.
‘We’ve both made steps to move on with things,’ said Karolyn, doing what Jamie wished he could do and taking her dad’s arm. Their father had to surrender his shopping to the carpet at his feet so he could reciprocate and hold Karolyn.
‘I’ll be home soon enough,’ Jamie tried again, ‘and I want us to try talking to somebody.’
‘Talking? To who?’ their father croaked.
‘A bereavement counsellor,’ Karolyn clarified. ‘Jamie found her online.’
The news sank in. Mr Beaton cleared his throat. ‘You want me to talk to a strange woman, about your mum?’
‘We’ll all talk with her,’ Jamie put in. ‘Or, if it’s easier, you can do it on your own at first. But we thought we could all do with getting some of it out in the open.’
‘You did, did you?’ Still noncommittal and not impressed, Samuel shifted back on the sofa, just an inch but enough to show he wanted to get away.
‘It was Holiday that did it,’ said Karolyn. ‘And hearing Mum’s voice. Did you know Jamie’s been visiting all the Cairngorm tourist spots we went to when Mum was alive? Some of them with his new friend, Ally!’ She turned wickedly laughing eyes on Jamie as she said this, and he fought hard to ignore his sister’s teasing.
He hadn’t talked much about how their date had gone, but Karolyn had always been able to read him like a kids’ picture book, so he hadn’t really needed to. He’d mentioned that he’d left her a voice message as soon as he woke up on Saturday morning, to check things were still OK, and to re-iterate how happy he was for her getting her new job.
He worried he should have re-recorded the thing. Had he sounded nervous? He’d been fine right up until the point he started to speak and the shaky, unsure feelings had hit him. Was she regretting what had happened? Or was she annoyed about how they’d left things? Bloody Finlay the ranger getting in the way of a proper, romantic goodbye. They’d been so rushed. He just knew he was already making a big mess of this.
He hadn’t told his sister how he’d left the ball firmly in Ally’s court as to what happened next, and that had been days ago. She’d replied with her own voice note message, just a few cheery-sounding words, telling him she was ‘super busy’ sorting things out for her trip and the skills share event which was, she’d been sorry to realise, the same day Jamie was planning on leaving town. She said she hoped they’d ‘bump into each other soon’ and left it at that.
Deep down, he wasn’t entirely sure how anything much could happen next, given their circumstances.
How he wished he hadn’t wasted time avoiding the pull of her, heeding Edwyn’s vague warning, when they could have been spending the best summer of their lives together. At least then, they might have had a solid foundation to leave things on before she flew away for a whole year. As it was, she was unlikely to want to wait for him.
He’d done the only thing he could think of. He’d celebrated her achievement, made sure she understood he was proud of her. The last thing he wanted was to be the person spoiling her excitement about her new life, especially after everything she’d been through with her ex and all her insecurities about not being as worthy of as great a career as her twin.
