Page 43 of Winter Magic at Hollybrae Castle

‘It’s Christmas. Everyone wants a slinky and socks with bells on. You literally just said it yourself. The best thing about Christmas is the small and quiet moments – the family moments. What would you get them? The world’s finest caviar and Scotland’s most expensive champagne? A top-of-the-line games console for each of the kids?’

‘It’d be a start!’

‘They’re not coming to be impressed by the size of your credit card bill, Ollie. One thing I learned from your office party is that everyone is sick of travelling and five-star resorts. They’re looking forward to quiet family time with their families and with ours. We should get them something we’d buy for our real relatives if they were staying with us over Christmas.’

He looks doubtful.

‘Seriously, Ol. Something fun, something they’d never buy for themselves but can wear around your cold castle, and you can never go wrong with a box of chocolates. I’ll go into Campbeltown this week and get however many we need. Do you trust me?’

I feel like I’m riding a magic carpet and asking Princess Jasmine to step off a balcony, and Ollie certainly looks like he’s teetering on the edge of a plunge to certain death.

‘Of course I don—’ He meets my eyes and stops the sentence abruptly, and his face contorts as he tries to reason with himself. ‘I don’t want to, but the problem is that since the moment you appeared on my computer screen, I have.’

Butterflies fill my insides instantaneously, so strong that I feel unsteady on my feet because I trusted him instantly too. ‘Good.’

‘Good,’ he echoes.

‘And reindeer antler headbands for everyone!’

‘Lu…’ he says warningly.

‘It will go down well, I promise. The one thing all adults need at Christmas is the ability to be silly – to revert to their childhood and remember what it felt like to be a kid waiting up for Santa and playing with toys, back when we believed in magic. If we can do that for those stuffy, uptight men, the promotion will be yours… if you want it.’

‘Of course I do,’ he mutters, but he doesn’t sound half as convincing as he thinks he does.

Leona Lewis is singing ‘One More Sleep’ from the TV while we put the finishing touches to the Christmas tree by hanging multi-coloured rainbow icicles from every branch, even though they’re rapidly losing any glitter they had left on them and it’s now all over us.

‘What will you do with the castle if you get the promotion? It’s just going to stay empty?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe rent it out as an Airbnb if Nancy and Hamish are willing to stay on and keep an eye on things.’

‘An Airbnb, really? You’d let strangers stay here, trample all over your property and poke their noses into all your nooks and crannies?’

‘Doesn’t that sound fun?’ His laugh is as bright as the jingling he’s doing, from his socks to the silver bell ornaments he’s hanging on the branches. ‘I can lock up private rooms, and just…’ He sighs in frustration. ‘I don’t know, Lu. I don’t know, okay? The promotion means leaving. No promotion means having to sell up. Neither option is what I want, but there aren’t any others, so it has to be one of those two. How is it any different to having my bosses and Clint stay over Christmas? I can guarantee they’ll be doing some nooking-and-crannying as well.’

‘I don’t know, but at least you’ll be here. You’ll be inviting people to share your home, not stay in an abandoned castle while you’re five hundred miles away. I keep thinking about those photos from the 1920s. What your dad said about the castle paying for itself. This place could be so much more than it is, if it…’

‘…had someone who wasn’t working all the time to care about it?’

‘I didn’t mean it like that.’ I hang another icicle up and try not to look at him.

I’m getting too comfortable here, acting like I have some right to suggest that how he handles things is wrong. I don’t know what it’s like to lose both parents and become responsible for a legacy that you don’t know what to do with. Who am I to say that burying himself in a job he clearly hates isn’t the best way to cope with that?

‘At the moment, it’s just… a ghost. A ghost in a ghostly landscape, and so am I.’

‘You’re not, Ol, you’re…’ I swallow hard. There are so many ways I could finish that sentence, and almost all of them involve saying something I shouldn’t. ‘You’re going to hate London. It’s the antithesis of here.’

He knows as well as I do that wasn’t where that sentence was initially going. ‘Maybe that’s a good thing.’

I meet his eyes. It’s not a good thing, and he doesn’t believe it either.

When the tree is done, it’s an explosion of colour and texture that would be best placed in the early 1980s, and if Patricia Calloway knew I could even think about making a tree look like this, she’d fire me for a second time just to make a point, but some trees don’t have to be perfect, and judging by the smile on Ollie’s face, this one is perfect for him.

He goes to turn the main light off, ‘I’ll Be Home for Christmas’ is playing on the TV, and he comes to stand next to me as we both look up at the glowing lights.

‘This is what I used to do after the tree was decorated. Sit in the dark and daydream about Christmas and magic and what the castle would be like when it was mine, in that silly way where kids don’t understand that to inherit something, your parents have to no longer be here.’

‘What were your plans for it?’