She walked over and stuck the pizza in the oven then grabbed her notebook and pen off the table and wrote down everything she could remember about the accident.
As she wrote, anxiety built in her stomach, and she closed her eyes, trying to quell the feeling. Ever since the accident she had been having panic attacks. She had always been an anxious person, but this was a different kind of anxiety, one that she hadn’t dealt with before. It started low in her belly and worked its way up, causing her heart to race uncontrollably. With each heartbeat, the energy built inside her until panic took over. Her mother had said it was completely normal to experience panic attacks and anxiety after a traumatic event. She was probably right, but Nora felt like there was something else there, as it felt eerily similar to the sensation she got when she had taken the man’s hand in her vision.
The one thing that seemed to soothe her was writing. So, she sat at her kitchen table and channeled her emotions onto the crisp white paper in lines and verses. There was something therapeutic about the pen gliding across the paper as her thoughts poured from her. She continued to write until her forearm began to ache, and she set the pen down.
Getting up, she pulled the pizza from the oven and let it cool on the counter, then walked into her bedroom. A thought had occurred to her while writing about the man’s appearance. He looked like he was dressed in the style of the nineteen thirties or forties, and it dawned on her where she might have seen him before.
She opened the closet door, reached behind a stack of shoes and old hiking gear, and retrieved a cardboard box. Bringing it over to the bed, she sat down, dusted off its top, and carefully opened it. Many of her grandmother’s belongings had been removed from the sugar shack after her passing, but Nora had held onto this small box of keepsakes.
There was an array of things inside—an old felted wool beret, a brooch with a bird on it that her gram was never without, a miniature of the Eiffel Tower her grandparents had gotten on their honeymoon, a small handful of framed photographs of her grandparents and father when he was a child, and a photo album with her name, Edith, embossed at the bottom of the puffy blue leather cover.
Nora pulled the album from the box and switched on the lamp on the bedside table. She rested against her pillow and started flipping through the album. It had been years since she last explored its pages. After her grandmother’s passing, it was the one thing she had requested to keep, as it held many fond memories for her. The loss had been so fresh and painful at the timethat she couldn’t bring herself to look through it. Instead, she had placed it into the box with the other items and tucked it away in her closet, not giving it much thought, until now.
Nora paused for a moment to run her fingers over her grandmother’s name, sunken into its cool leather cover. Nostalgia washed over her, and she pushed down the sadness before it bubbled over. As she flipped open the album, a plume of dust burst into the air and rained down around her. Her grandmother had used the album as a storybook at bedtime when Nora was a child, telling her the tales behind each photograph. Nora had loved it and the way her grandmother lit up every time she told her the stories inside its pages.
The first page was her grandmother’s high school graduation photo. A beautiful younger version of her looked back through black-and-white eyes. The next page held a mixture of pictures, one featuring her standing in front of a car with her high school sweetheart, another capturing her sunbathing on a rocky beach in Maine, and one showing her walking down the streets of New York City with her best friend Barbara. Nora couldn’t help but smile at the sheer joy her grandmother radiated in every photograph. With her wide infectious smile, it was as if a radiant halo of happiness surrounded her.
Tucked within the album were postcards, one showcasing the bustling streets of Edinburgh while another captured the serene beauty of a place named Letterfearn. Numerous snapshots showed her grandmother amidst the diverse landscapes of Scotland—from the winding cobblestone streets and towering buildings in the city to the rugged countryside adorned with fields of heather and grazing sheep with the sea in the background. There were also images of her serving as a medic nurse during World War II, tending to wounded soldiers and standing guardover stretchers. A large photograph dominated the next page. Her grandmother stood proudly on the steps of a military hospital in her nurse’s uniform, flanked by her fellow nurses.
Nora continued to flip through the album until she landed on the page she was searching for. There, standing next to her grandmother, was a man with his leg bandaged, leaning on a crutch, while her grandmother offered support on the other side, helping to hold him up. It was the very same man she had seen in her vision after the accident, but why? Why would this man be whom she saw in the face of death? It didn’t make any sense. Had she pulled his face from the recesses of her mind because this album had been a comfort to her in childhood, and she had remembered him? She recalled what her grandmother had told her about the man. He had been the first patient she treated during World War II and said he had a story to tell, like the ones in the movies.
Her grandmother had pursued a nursing education, and when the call for nurses went out, she knew she needed to volunteer and aid in the fight. Stationed in Scotland as a medic nurse during the winter of 1943, right in the heart of World War II, she had been sent to assist the Craigleith Military Hospital. It marked her first time leaving the United States, and she had fallen in love with Scotland the moment her feet touched the ground. However, her idealism had left her unprepared for the trauma she would face.
By November 1943, the hospital had reached nearly full capacity, and many wounded soldiers couldn’t make it home for the holidays. This left her and only four other nurses to care for the men during the holiday season.
One particular Scottish soldier had captivated her with his story of survival. He was an avid reader and had carried a smallbook with him into battle. His infantry came under attack, and he was struck by two bullets, one to his left leg and one to the chest, right above his heart. The only thing that had saved him was the tiny red book, a novel he had kept in the breast pocket of his uniform. The force of the gunshots had blown him backward, and he suffered a severe head injury, making it impossible for him to read. When he found his way into her unit, Nora’s grandmother took pity on him and helped him finish the book that saved his life, reading around the bullet holes in each page.
Why would she dream up this man that her grandmother helped back in World War II? She peeled back the clear film holding the picture in the album and removed the photograph. On the back in her grandmother’s neat cursive writing was the name Colin MacDonald.
She turned it back over and looked at the man again, remembering his kind eyes and gentle smile as he helped her in her vision. Her grandmother had insisted that she take his hand as if she knew he could save her. The hair on the back of her neck rose, and she felt a strange energy course through her. She slid the photo back into the album and began to close it when another picture caught her eye.
There was a yellowed photo of her grandmother, in her twenties, standing on a street in Edinburgh, with Edinburgh Castle perched in the background atop Castle Rock. She stood holding a book in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other, as snow fell around her like glittering sparks of magic. This particular photo had always held a special allure for Nora, even when she was a child. Gazing at it, she could almost transport herself to that very moment, feeling the enchantment that was captured within the old grainy film.
Nora looked back into the box full of her grandmother’smemories and pulled out the framed wedding photograph of her grandparents. Sadly, Nora never had the chance to get to know her grandfather, as he had passed away when she was just a baby. Even though she had heard stories of him her whole life, he was merely a face in framed photos. She noticed her grandmother lacked the spark in her eyes that she had in the album’s photos. Engraved at the bottom of the frame was their wedding date, March 25, 1944. Wondering if the trauma she had seen during the war had stripped her grandmother of that spark, Nora tucked the frame back into the box but kept out the album and the brooch.
As she set the album aside and placed the box back into her closet, a thought sprang to the forefront of her mind. What if she decided to go to Scotland and turn the album into a guide for her trip, a personal quest to locate each of the places in her grandmother’s photos? Perhaps even recreate a few. Picking the album back up, she flipped through its pages again until she found the picture of her grandmother standing in front of Edinburgh Castle. Carefully peeling back the clear plastic holding it in place, she took a photo with her phone. This would be the first picture she would recreate upon arriving in Edinburgh.
After all these years hidden in her gram’s jacket pocket, the plane ticket voucher was the first step to embarking on the trip Nora’s grandmother had planned for her, and the photo album idea was the perfect way to pay tribute. Nora walked to her dresser mirror and pulled down a plaid scarf hanging from its side. A gift from her grandmother on her twentieth birthday, it had been wrapped in a small box with a note that readYour family tartan. Nora often wore it during the holidays, its plaid looking quite festive, a mix of green, red, and blue. But now it held a deeper significance for her, and she knew it needed to accompany the album on the trip.
She pulled her suitcase out of her closet and laid it on her bed. It had once been black, but it looked more like a charcoal gray with all the layers of dust that clung to it from never being used. Unzipping it sent a plume of dust flying into the air, causing her to sneeze several times.
“Tell me you don’t travel without telling me you don’t travel,” she joked out loud to herself.
She carefully pinned the brooch to her scarf, then tucked it snugly away in an inner pocket. As she placed the cherished photo album in the center of the suitcase, the realization hit her—this was it. She was committed.
She returned to the kitchen, retrieved her bag, and pulled out the blue envelope containing the ticket voucher. With trembling hands, she dialed the number listed on the back and endured nearly an hour on hold as the airline searched for available flights. Finally, she received confirmation: in just two days, she would be boarding a plane bound for Scotland.
Chapter Five
Reservations
Nora was seated at her kitchen table, busy making Airbnb reservations and booking guided tours of Edinburgh, when a knock at the door interrupted her. She wasn’t surprised to find her parents standing there when she answered.
“Hi, honey,” her father greeted her, giving her a side hug as he entered the house. “Your mom and I thought you might need a little dinner, so we picked you up some homemade cheddar and broccoli soup from Rae’s on our way home.”
“You guys didn’t need to do that,” Nora said, taking the soup container from her father and placing it on the counter next to the half-eaten frozen pizza from earlier. Her mother glanced at the pizza, wrinkling her nose in disapproval, and then she noticed Nora’s laptop on the table.
“What is this all about?” her mother asked, stepping over to the table and pointing at the open reservation page for the room Nora had booked in the city.
