Page 18 of A Secret Scottish Escape

Dad threw his hands into the air. “You need time to digest all this, darling. It’s been a horrible time for you. Going through the funeral today was bad enough, but to have Hannah and then this heart thing dropped on you as well…”

“I don’t need time, Dad.” I smoothed down my shirt. “I can’t stay in Loch Harris after all this. There are too many bad memories.”

Faith exchanged wary glances with my dad. “What are you saying? You’re thinking of leaving?”

“You’ve lived here all your life,” reasoned Dad. “You always said you loved it here and would never leave.”

I tilted my chin up, tears catching in my throat at Dad’s fallen expression. “Yes, well, things have changed. Mac saw to that.”

I rose to my feet, my heart in the pit of my stomach. “Leaving Loch Harris is the only way I can move on.”

Chapter Ten

The following couple of weeks passed in a haze.

I tried to keep occupied by getting the cottage valued, reviewing two new albums, interviewing a controversial street artist for one of the broadsheets, and writing a feature about the financial hit Loch Harris had taken due to the shaky economy.

“Maybe it’s a blessing I’m moving on,” I’d remarked to Dad one evening over a plate of lasagne and crusty garlic bread.

“A blessing for who?” he’d barked. “For me? You? Or Loch Harris?”

I knew I had to make a start on clearing away Mac’s collection of blown-glass paperweights and, over a mug of builder’s tea, I gathered my resolve to do just that.

I studied them as I wrapped them in brown paper, before carefully placing them in a cardboard box. When he was alive, Mac had guarded them jealously; he would set them on shelves around the spare bedroom, like an array of invaluable orbs from an alien planet. Lois had agreed to take them.

Just a couple of days after the funeral, Lois had volunteered to come over from her home in Fife to help me sort through his things. “You are not doing all that on your own,” she had insisted.

And so, like the kind and organised whirlwind that she was, Lois arrived armed with warm scones to give us some sustenance, and we quickly packed away his golf clubs, notebooks, and book collection before turning our attention to his wardrobe.

“Is there anything you would like to keep?” I had asked her, dragging a weary hand through my ponytail.

Lois had surveyed Mac’s clothes, lying in a heap on the bed in the spare room. There were his casual checked shirts, an array of richly coloured ties, his Pringle jumpers – the patterns and materials merging against each other, sleeves criss-crossing. “I’ll take his Celtic cross cufflinks, if you don’t mind.”

Then her forlorn eyes had strayed to his paperweights jostling on the shelves. “I wouldn’t mind taking that jade and blue one. Mac called it Neptune as he always said it reminded him of the sea.”

I blinked at her. “I didn’t know that.”

I shouldn’t have been surprised. There was so much about Mac I’d thought I known but didn’t.

Lois had squirmed under her lavender shirt, detecting the hidden meaning in my words. “Let me know which clothes of his you want to keep and I’ll bag up the rest for the charity shop.”

I cast my attention across the ties, crisp shirts, and sharply cut jackets. Part of me didn’t want to keep any of it.

Against my better judgement, I reached over and picked up one of Mac’s silk ties in steel grey – the one he had been wearing the first time I met him.

I recalled how it had complimented the shade of his eyes and I had found it very difficult to concentrate on the interview. The material slithered through my fingers as I stood there, remembering. I placed it to one side. “I’ll keep this one.”

It was then that Lois had made another valiant attempt to try and talk to me about the money Mac had left for me.

“Please Lois,” I’d begged, snatching up one of Mac’s polo shirts. “I’ve told you already. I’m not accepting it.”

She had grudgingly agreed to drop the topic, but I’d seen in her dark eyes that she wasn’t surrendering just yet.

Lois had stayed the night and departed the next morning after breakfast. After a prolonged hug and a promise that she would ring me that evening, she vanished in her little mint-green Honda Civic.

I had watched her melt out of sight past the line of trees, the mid-April sky making promises it might not be able to keep.

Lois had insisted on ringing me frequently to make sure I was OK, or at least as OK as I could be, under the circumstances – I suppose it wasn’t every day that your fiancé collapsed and died while on top of his ex-wife. I appreciated her concern, but resisted making any firm arrangements to see her again, at least for the time being.