“But-”
“I know you’re worrying about how we’ll afford the rent without you, but Winnie’s cousin is going to take your room so it’s all cool. She’s broken up with her boyfriend so it’s perfect really.”
“Do I have any say in this at all? Don’t I have any rights?”
Karen smiled sympathetically. “No written contract so not really. We’re cool though, yeah? Friends?”
“Oh yeah, great,” Natalie said, hating herself for doing so. She wanted to yell and scream at them about how unfair it all was but what was the point?They’d still throw her out. “I’ll probably move in with Greg. What? Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Well, I wasn’t sure when to bring it up, but he dropped by earlier.”
She raised her eyebrows. He’d been avoiding her calls for the last week and now he’d suddenly shown up out of the blue.
“Yeah, he wanted to ask for his DVDs back if you find them. Said he’s sure you’ll find someone else eventually but if you could stop ringing him and leaving messages that would be great.”
“But…but he hasn’t broken up with me.”
“He was very much under the impression he had. Said it wasn’t you though, it was him. Needed some time to find himself. Thinks you’re great. That’s sweet, isn’t it?”
“No, that isn’t sweet. That’s the biggest cliché of all time. No, second biggest. The biggest would be saying we hoped we could still be friends.”
“Oh yeah, he said that as well.” Karen smiled. “Never mind. All the more time to work on your theory, right?”
“Yay,” she said, sarcasm dripping from her words. “Lucky me.”
So, she’d gone from employed to jobless andhomeless in a day. Boyfriendless too. She looked down at the mail. There was a letter addressed to her. Was it going to tell her she had cancer? That seemed all that was left.
She took the letter through to her room. The laughter and conversation resumed almost at once. She closed her door, leaning back against the wood before taking several deep breaths, her eyes closed.
When she opened them again, she felt calmer, her hands no longer shaking. Everything happens for a reason. That was what her parents always used to tell her. But then they died in a car crash. What was the reason for that?
She tore open the letter and managed a half smile. It was from her agent.
We’re pleased to enclose the advance negotiated with the publisher. Please be aware that the deadline has now been confirmed below for final submission of the completed manuscript. They will require confirmation of your theories regarding the highland clans before publication can progress any further.
She looked at the check. It was low four figures, butit was at least something. That and the money in lieu of notice from work and she should at least be able to find somewhere to live until she got another job.
She crossed the room to her desk and opened up her laptop. It coughed slowly into life and then she had to wait another age for the Internet to load. She spent the rest of the day looking for places to live.
She lost count of the number of phone calls she made. They all followed the same pattern.
“Hi, can I ask about the room to let?”
“Sure.”
Then some small talk before the killer blow from them. “And what job do you have?”
“Well, actually I’ve just lost my-”
The endings ranged from abrupt to polite, but they were all the same. No one wanted to let a house to someone without provable income. She tried mentioning the check from the publisher but that made no difference.
She left several messages for people, hoping they’d get back to her. She signed up to as many email alerts as she could find. Finally, she began to cast her net wider. Did she really need to stay in Cromarty? Just because she’d grown up here wasn’treally enough of a reason to stay. What about moving somewhere different?
She requested callbacks, filling in her details and her needs. They weren’t much. Just a room. That would do. She didn’t have much stuff. Since her parents had died, she’d given away a lot of possessions, and had never really regretted doing so.
It was nine o’clock that night when she got her first call back. It was the call that changed her life.
She was laid on her bed reading a nineteenth century treatise about the founding of Sweetheart Abbey, tapping the page as she did so. “I told him I was telling the truth,” she said out loud. “Right here. Some early sources believe Wallace MacGregor founded the abbey in memory of his father.”
