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“Peggy, this is all too much,” I protested, grateful tears welling in my eyes.

“Och, it’s nothing more than ye’d do for us if we needed it. Yer one of us noo, aye? We take care of our own in Banhaven. Ye’ll see for yerself soon enough. Och, I almost forgot. Have ye checked the state of the upstairs yet?”

“There’s an upstairs? Where?” I asked, my eyebrows shooting up in surprise. “I didn’t see any stairs.”

“Come see fer yerself,” she replied, her eyes twinkling again, this time with delight.

NINE

Hame & Away was teeming with customers despite the fact that it was almost midafternoon by the time I’d cleaned the apartment enough to earn a coffee treat.

When locals spoke of the haar, the fog that rolled in off the sea, they made it sound like a mercurial entity with a will of its own that followed few rules, if any. Most days, it burned off by midmorning, but occasionally it hung around all day, cloaking everything and everyone in damp cold that burrowed down to the bone. Trying hard not to feel smug about the thick cable-knit—the white thing Peggy had tossed into my armoire—I shouldered my way past the out-of-town visitors woefully underdressed for the weather, shivering as they stood in line, waiting for hot drinks to warm them up from the inside out.

Shona greeted my arrival with a wry look and a wave that morphed into a gesture pointing at the espresso machine, the cups lined up in front of it, and a finger held up that I took to mean “I’ll make yours as soon as those are done.” I replied with a nod and a smile that I hoped she interpreted as “no rush, I’m fine” before making my way to the back of the shop in search of an empty seat.

Out of the corner of my eye, I spied one chair that looked unoccupied and braced myself to make small talk with the other people at the table while I waited for my drink.

After spending the day alone in the apartment, it was nice to be surrounded by happy chatter and even nicer to be greeted by a few people excited to ask me about my plans for the shop or welcoming me to Banhaven with friendly back claps and handshakes.

I moved through the crowd, doing my best to memorize names and faces as I went, even though more than half slipped my mind the instant I heard them. If I couldn’t picture how a name was spelled in my head, there was little chance that I would retain it until I’d heard it a few times, and Scottish names were some of the hardest I’d ever encountered. Not that asking people to spell their names had proven helpful over the last few weeks.

I still hadn’t figured out how Caiomhe could possibly be pronounced Queeva, and I’d pretty much given up trying to figure out how Siobhan became Shevon when I finally reached the still empty chair on the other side of the room.

The words “If anyone’s not sitting here, would you mind terribly if I…” were out of my mouth before I registered whom I was speaking to.

My eyes snagged on the bright brown eyes that sent my heart into overdrive every time they met mine, and the rest of my sentence scattered to the four winds.

“Oh” was the best I could manage as my cheeks flamed hotter than ever. Too panicked to make sense of my own rioting emotions, I focused on deciphering the flurry of expressions flashing across Art’s face. I caught delight and surprise, closely followed by something that might have been shame but was too quickly locked down behind an unreadable mask for me to interpret properly.

We stared at each other, both at a loss for words, until the person sitting kitty-corner across from him muttered something under her breath that sounded an awful lot like “As if things could get any worse.”

Glancing down to see who’d elicited the slight flush turning Art’s ears and cheeks pink sent one crystal-clear thought ringing right through the confused chaos in my head.

He’s not here alone. He brought a woman with him. That would explain so much, I thought, blinking back the tears that suddenly flooded my eyes.

“Viv. Please?” Art said, in an exasperated tone that didn’t fit the narrative quickly forming in my head. “Can you sit up? And maybe push your hair out of your face?”

With a groan that made the whole table reverberate and the little boy to Art’s right giggle, the woman sat up comically straight and shook her fire-engine-red hair out of her face.

Not a woman. A teen girl. A teen girl with an overexaggerated smile that bordered on insolent smirk, batting her eyes at the man who had to be her father.

“Meg, these are my kids, Vivienne and Merry,” Art deadpanned. “Kids, this is…”—he hesitated before finishing his sentence as simply as possible—“Meg. This is Meg.”

I stared, dumbstruck, as the two children I’d imagined with him on the beach stared back at me—one with unabashed curiosity and delight, the other with angry tears beading along her bottom lashes. Art had never shown me pictures of his children. So how had I pictured them so perfectly?

“Daaaaaaaad,” Vivienne whined, her feigned composure melting right along with her posture. “You promised you’d call me Viv. You promised!”

Art winced and with a sheepish grimace introduced his daughter again. “Meg, this is my daughter, Viv. My bad. Better?” he asked her.

She grumbled something under her breath and slumped back down in her seat, dropping her head to hide her face behind her curtain of hair.

Still looking pained, Art looked back up at me. “This is what I meant when I said it was complicated,” he explained as my name rang out over the crowd, sparing me from having to answer right there and then.

Shona handed me a steaming to-go cup with an apologetic smile and a warm “Welcome tae the high street, Meg. We’re all thrilled yer here.” My heart swelled as the crowd echoed the sentiment and toasted my arrival with their own cups.

The heartfelt welcome eased some of the worry that maybe I’d made the mistake of a lifetime. I felt far too at home in Banhaven for it to have been just a reason to not go back to the States. Something that felt this right couldn’t possibly be wrong.

My eyes drifted toward Art and his kids on the other side of the coffee shop. His eyes met mine and bored into me as I hesitated at the counter, shifting the hot cup from hand to hand. Go back? Or escape to the relative safety of my new home? When the woman behind me cleared her throat, I made a split-second decision and bolted for the door being held open by a man who looked like he’d just stepped off a fishing boat. The whiff of brine mixed with fish guts that wafted off him as I darted past him confirmed my hypothesis, and I gulped down a lungful of cold air the moment I hit the street to settle my suddenly heaving stomach.