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There was nodding. Kirsty had heard enough. Any more of this and she was going to move back into her stinking flat. She didn’t care if it was dirty, smelly and had holes in the floor. It was better than this torture. This was adding insult to injury. She’d been attacked, lost her business and home, Lake was nowhere to be found and now she had to suffer the insanity of Invertary’s gossipmongers. Her head was going to explode if she listened to much more.
“I’m going for a walk,” Kirsty told her mother, who was serving a customer at the front of her shop.
“It’s snowing,” her mother protested.
“Excellent,” Kirsty said. “That means I might get some peace to think.”
She wrapped herself in the ugly fur coat that had been a gift from her mother. It summed up her life that one of the few things to survive the fire was the coat she hated so much. She pulled on a borrowed woollen scarf, and borrowed woollen gloves, and went out into the high street.
The snow was coming down thick and fast. The hills around Invertary were shrouded in heavy cloud as fat snowflakes covered Kirsty’s world. As she came to a stop in front of the burnt-out shell that used to be her home, she noted that the white frosting made even the desolation seem pretty. Kirsty stared at the mess before her. There was literally nothing left, and instead of despair, all Kirsty felt was a strange kind of acceptance. She hadn’t had one panic attack since the fire. She’d spent nights lying in her old bedroom, listening to her mother snoring, as she tried to figure out where the panic had gone. Eventually she’d come to the conclusion that the source of her panic attacks was fear. Fear that everything she had would disappear. Now that it had actually happened, there really was nothing left to fear. She was still standing. She was still living day after day. As gut-wrenchingly awful as everything was, she actually felt hope.
“Staring at it isn’t going to change anything,” Betty said as she came up beside her.
Kirsty kept her eyes on the mess as the snow coated her from head to toe.
“Is he coming back?” she asked at last.
“Of course he’s coming back, stupid lassie,” Betty said.
“Is he staying when he comes back?” Her heart beat fast at the thought of it.
“I don’t think it’s my place to talk about that,” Betty told her.
Kirsty turned towards her.
“Since when do you care about butting into other people’s business?”
“That’s a good point,” Betty said. “But the man has a plan and I don’t want you to ruin it, so I’m keeping my trap shut.”
Kirsty grunted. She recognised the stubborn look on Betty’s face and knew she wouldn’t get the information out of her. Not without threatening her, anyway. She thought hard. Maybe a bribe?
“I’ll buy you pies for a month if you tell me what’s going on.”
“Ha!” Betty said. “With what? You don’t have any money. You don’t have a business and you don’t have a home. You didn’t even have the sense to stop the police taking all those diamonds. It’s pathetic. I mean, look at you—you don’t even have a decent coat.”
Kirsty looked down at the ugly fur coat her mother had given her, and then back to Betty’s smug wee face. Something went pop inside of her, like a pin to a balloon. The colossal screw-up of her life was suddenly a black comedy. Without being able to stop it, she started to giggle. The look of surprise on Betty’s face made her laugh harder. Betty started to chuckle, and together they held each other and laughed until tears were streaming down their cheeks.
“Well,” Betty said as she wiped her face. “This is a bloody mess.”
“And I have no idea what to do about it,” Kirsty said with a grin.
“At least you’re cheery,” Betty said, and they started to laugh all over again.
“I think it might be hysterics,” Kirsty said through her tears.
That made them laugh harder.
At last, gasping for breath, they calmed down. Kirsty felt lighter than she had since the fire.
“When you talk to Lake,” she told Betty, “tell him that as far as I’m concerned the war isn’t over.”
Betty’s eyes sparkled.
&nbs
p; “And how exactly are you going to fight?” she said.
“I haven’t figured that part out yet,” Kirsty said. “Tell him that if he doesn’t come back and fight like a man, I’ll take that as a sign of surrender and will broadcast to the world that I won the war.”
