Part One
1
December 2025
‘Are you scared?’
We had been driving west for three hours, further and further from any populated area with every passing mile. Inverness Airport, where we had picked up our rental, seemed a long way behind us. The last car we’d seen had gone by twenty minutes ago, just after we’d driven past the sign telling us the main road across the peninsula was closed because of snow and that we’d have to take the much longer coastal route. I was a city dweller, used to traffic jams and red lights, to noise and people, not silence and sheep. I wasn’t accustomed to driving on single-track roads along clifftops that dropped to deserted rocky beaches. I wasn’t used to it at all.
But that wasn’t why Holly had asked me if I was scared.
It was because I was going to meet her family. Her brother and her sister and her sister’s husband.
And her dad. Charles Grant.
The way he loomed in my imagination, she might have been taking me to meet Charles Manson.
‘Scared?’ I asked. ‘Not at all.’
‘Nervous, then?’
‘No. I’m excited.’
She knew I was lying, but she reached across from the passenger seat and lay her hand on my thigh, just above my knee. ‘That’s the spirit. They’re going to love you.’
‘And if they don’t?’
‘Hmm. Well, if my dad suggests a trip out to sea in a small boat, that’s when you should start worrying. Apparently, the water here is deeper than at any other point around the British Isles.’
‘Noted. Avoid trips in small boats.’
She laughed. ‘Don’t worry, Patrick. I’m not going to let that happen. I’m sure you and Dad will get on brilliantly.’
I glanced over at her. Nine months into our relationship, she could still take my breath away, even in the long, quilted coat that could easily have been mistaken for a sleeping bag. When I’d first shown her picture to my friends the general reaction was that I was ‘punching’, which I pretended to find offensive. But the truth was, with her natural red hair, feline green eyes and the way she always looked like she was thinking of something wicked-but-funny, I was still not quite able to believe my luck.
She was gorgeous. And her family was rich. Not just well-off. Seriously, famously, loaded. It had made me uncomfortable at first, and a little worried. I had never been skiing, or stayed in a five-star hotel. I knew nothing about wine or stocks and shares, and to me ‘the season’ was the period when football was played, not the time of year when the other half enjoyed Glyndebourne and the Proms and Ascot. What would Holly, and her family, think of someone from a modest background like me? But when I’d raised this with Holly very early in our relationship, she had been taken aback.
‘Do I really seem like the kind of girl who goes to the Proms? I’m just like you, Patrick. Completely ordinary.’
‘Thanks.’
She had laughed. ‘I didn’t mean it like that. I think we see the world in the same way, don’t you? And just so you know, my dad grew up with no money. He’s a working-class lad. He’d much rather go to a Villa match than bloody Glyndebourne.’
I didn’t point out that he’d be sitting in the most expensive seat in the stadium. I liked hearing her say we were the same, because I believed it, too. Halfway through our first date, when she had told me, while attempting a really bad Arnie impression, thatTerminator2 was her favourite movie, I had begun to experience something that had only happened once or twice before. The sensation of meeting a kindred spirit. We liked the same music and books and food. Hated the same things, too– from virtue-signalling to the word ‘nom’– and agreed about politics. That first evening, in a vegetarian restaurant in Brighton, there hadn’t been a single moment of awkwardness or silence. After kissing her goodnight I hadn’t been able to stop grinning all the way home.
‘How about you?’ I asked now. ‘Are you nervous?’
‘Oh, I’ve met my family lots of times.’
It was my turn to laugh. ‘I meant about meeting Jasmine.’
Instead of answering, Holly exhaled and turned her face to the window. Beneath us, the grey sea beat against the shore, foaming and clawing at the dark pebbles.
‘I’m excited,’ she said. ‘In exactly the same way you are.’
‘It’s going to be much harder for her, though.’
Holly didn’t reply. We had first heard Jasmine’s name a month ago, when a flurry of texts had landed on Holly’s phone, followed by hours of WhatsApp chat with her siblings, and days of speculation that had ended with a FaceTime call with Charles, who had confirmed that yes, he had met someone. He’d been keeping it quiet because he wanted to be surebefore he shared the news with the rest of the family. And then the bombshell:
