Page 13 of The Scottish Island Inn

He reached for her hand at the top of the steps. For a moment, she held it. The sensation of his nearness was almost hallucinatory. It was the same as when he’d hugged her so briefly earlier: the same sudden memory of the feel of his touch; the sense of the closeness of him. Sorrel closed her eyes and bowed her head; she felt tears rush to her eyes. It was too hard to think about what she’d lost.

Overwhelmed, she pulled her hand away.

SEVEN

‘I can’t actually believe you’re back. Gahh. I can’t stop hugging you. I won’t stop.’ Heather Balhennie’s voice was barely audible from where her face was smushed into her sister’s shoulder. ‘We thought you’d gone forever. It was horrible, Sorrel. It was like there was a piece of the puzzle missing and it was never going to be the same.’

‘You have to stop eventually, you know,’ Sorrel replied, quietly. ‘Hugging, that is.’

Heather had always been the most affectionate one. She was a crier, a hugger, the Balhennie sister who was always the first to share her feelings.

Heather couldn’t live if she didn’t feel. Sorrel, who had sometimes struggled to be in touch with her feelings, had always loved her sister’s openness. ‘We’re on a walk. I can’t walk with you hugging me.’

‘You can. I’ll hang around your neck like a baby monkey. You can just carry me around.’ Heather pouted, but released her arms. ‘The thing is, I don’t want to let you go. If I let you go, you might run away again. I’ve never been very good with separation.’

‘I know. You had that stuffed donkey you cuddled every night, since you were two.’

‘Eeyore. I still have him.’ Heather nodded.

‘Heather. He must be rank by now.’ Sorrel let out an involuntary laugh.

‘He’s been washed. I’m not a monster.’

Sorrel had missed all of her family, in every day of the ten years she’d lived another life. For every day of those ten years, she had wanted her sisters and her parents and her home. She’d missed the very bricks and stone of the Inn. The smell of it. The heft of the place; its wide, ornate wooden staircases that dated back hundreds of years. Its thick royal blue carpets. Catriona’s vintage bone china collection, proudly displayed on a Welsh dresser in the dining room.

Sorrel had missed her room. She’d missed lounging on her bed with Heather or Violet or Bluebell or one of her other sisters, drinking hot chocolate, gossiping or watching a movie.

She’d missed the bustling kitchen, stripping beds, making breakfasts, helping out the Inn’s customers with directions and car hire and helping Catriona manage the Inn’s online booking system that never quite worked properly.

And Sorrel had missed the land of Skye itself; the rocky waterfalls, the long, empty roads, the green and orange and purple moors that stretched for miles. All the time she’d been away, she’d thought she’d been happy. But all it had taken was one day back on the island for her to smell the comforting tang of the earth and feel the crisp breeze on her skin, and she knew. She knew she’d only been half a person in London.

But all of it – the land, the sky, the smell of the place– they had been tainted in her memory; tainted by the secret she couldn’t forget.

‘I’m sorry. I know you’re not a monster.’ Sorrel squeezed her sister back.

Her other sister, Bluebell, stood slightly apart from them both, looking shy. She’d been uncharacteristically quiet for the whole of the walk so far.

‘Blue… are you okay?’ Sorrel reached out to her sister, but Bluebell stayed apart.

‘It’s been a long time,’ her sister said. ‘I… I’m just having trouble adjusting.’

‘I know. It must be weird.’ Sorrel put her outstretched hand in her pocket. Randomly, she wished she’d brought something to eat with her: a treat of some kind that she could give her sister, like you’d give an apple to a skittish horse. They stopped as the castle came into view through a clearing in the ancient oaks and yews they had been walking alongside. Sorrel had always loved this part of the ancient woodland; much of Skye was moorland, where the wind made it difficult for trees to grow. Yet here at the edge of the loch and around the castle, there was woodland, no doubt planted by the lairds of long ago.

Bluebell looked out over the loch, where they stood. ‘Remember when we used to take a boat out to Dun Fiadhairt? I haven’t done that in ages. Not since…’ she broke off.

Not since you left. Her youngest sister’s unsaid words hung in the air.

Sorrel rested her palm on the yew next to her and looked down on the blue-green expanse of Loch Balhennie below. To her right stood the castle, overlooking the loch, and in the distance she could see the small island of Dun Fiadhairt, where there was an Iron Age broch, or fort. You could get there by boat, but it was a clamber over boggy moorland to get to the broch itself.

Still, once you were there, you could still stand in it with the walls around you and imagine, if only for a short while, that it was a distant time in history and not the twenty-first century with its memes and burnout and men who apparently thought they were entitled to as many women as they could grasp. She was furious about Simon; furious about what he’d thrown away with his thoughtless betrayal.

Perhaps it hadn’t been thoughtless. Perhaps he’d done exactly what he intended to do.

That thought made her feel worse. But this wasn’t the moment to be thinking about Simon.

Sorrel held her hand out to Bluebell.

‘I remember.’