Page 30 of A Scottish Lighthouse Escape

Chapter Twelve

I ran to the end of the pavement. The stranger’s car vanished up the road, and it was only after he’d disappeared that it occurred to me that I should have taken a note of his car registration and gone to the Police, but what would I have said? ‘This man was looking into my cottage window.’ He could have a perfectly innocent explanation. I was struggling to think of something plausible, though.

I returned to Bronte, who was stationed beside our two shopping bags outside the supermarket entrance.

I made my way back clutching the shopping with Bronte trotting beside me like a little pony, secured on her lead. I peered up the road, in the same direction as the mysterious older man had headed in his car only moments ago. Was he local? Did he live here in Rowan Bay? Or was he a tourist? Or maybe he had a holiday home here?

Maybe Mitch had been right. Perhaps he’d simply been out for a stroll, taken a wrong turning and was going to ask for directions. But then, if he had, why not knock on the door, instead of peering in the sitting room and frightening me half to death and then running away.

I turned everything over in my head as I bumped my shopping along gripping Bronte’s lead at the same time; I wasn’t prepared to take any chances and let her off her lead again just yet.

I thought again about the older man I just saw.

What if Mitch had been right after all? What if I’d overreacted about the man at the window? What if my imagination had run away with me and the poor soul had just been lost or looking for someone? I was a writer, after all.

You were, reminded a dark voice in my subconscious. And my head wasn’t in a good place right now. In fact, I wondered if it would ever be again.

I glanced up at the marbled, miserable sky. The weather in Scotland round these parts could change in an instant.

It seemed like only yesterday that I’d arrived here, my face swollen with crying; the hundreds of miles between me and London a distant memory.

I completed the walk back to the cottage in a mental fog.

Would I ever be able to get my life back on an even keel? How could I move on from this? What had happened had delivered a severe kicking to my heart and splintered it into tiny pieces. How the hell could I manage to push everything into the past and pick my life back up?

Would I ever be able to do that?

The thought struck me like a huge, forked bolt of lightning. I never, ever would’ve imagined me living my life without Joe by my side. The very thought had seemed incomprehensible. People say it takes time and you never learn to get over your grief. You just learn how to deal with it from your own personal perspective.

But after all this – the revelations about him and Greta; me scrambling to face each day; struggling to put one foot in front of the other; abandoning London and our home and fleeing to Scotland with just a few belongings in the boot of the car – maybe I had to face up to the reality that this was my life now.

I didn’t know if I had the energy or the heart to try and start again. Everything seemed such a monumental effort and I didn’t have the passion.

How I hated it that he’d died and left all this car crash of emotions behind him.

I gave my head a mental jolt and crossed the road with Bronte and my groceries.

My grandparent’s cottage sat there, framed by the exploding clumps of heather in the garden and the bay water swishing about down below. Barclay had been tending to Grandma’s plants and mowing the lawn. It looked picture postcard pretty, even at this time of year.

Opposite and perched up on the cliff face was the lighthouse and its assorted, accompanying little outhouses. It fired upwards into the grey day in a solid white and blue statue.

Pictures of Barclay doffing his cap, shaking his white head of thick hair, and belting out that gusty laugh of his, skipped through my mind. He’d been an excellent listener. He would have left me to sit there to wallow in my self-pity for a few minutes, before handing me a shot of his glistening, amber whiskey and instructing me to pour my heart out.

My downturned mouth trembled at the thought of the sweet, elderly man. I was delighted for him and Mags. They deserved to be together and live the rest of their lives as a happy, contented couple.

I wished he was still here, though. He and Mags had given me a call the other day and ordered me to visit them in Loch Lomond once they’d got their little cottage sorted, and I promised I would.

If Barclay could see me now, he’d have a few choice words to say to me about dusting myself down and taking each day as it came. But I didn’t even feel capable of doing that. Everything felt like a marathon that I had to limp through, and at night I’d fall into bed, dismissing visions of Joe spooned beside me.

Then I’d wake up with the sickening realisation of what had happened and the cold, brutal truth that I had to face another day in the knowledge that Joe had loved someone else.

It seemed like everything was happening at once – and not in a good way.

I eyed the lighthouse as I locked the garden gate behind me and negotiated my way up the path with my carrier bags. I let Bronte off the lead, and she pelted around the lawn for a few moments, then screeched up to the front door.

I opened it and allowed Bronte to skitter inside first, before I angled my way in with my shopping and locked the door behind me.

I began to deposit my spoils on top of the grey marble breakfast bar.