‘Aye.’
‘You don’t have to?—’
‘I know.’
I don’t have to do any of this. I’m choosing to. For reasons I’m not ready to name out loud, in a car that’s speeding toward a destination I haven’t warned my mother about, with a woman whose boyfriend I knocked out cold.
There will be consequences. The team. My contract. The unified front we’ve been pretending exists since pre-season.
None of it matters as much as the fact that she’s here, alive, breathing, and no longer in that house. No longer with him.
She shifts against the headrest, and her hair catches the light from the dashboard. The scent of her shampoo, clean and faintly sweet, drifts over, and my hold tightens on the steering wheel because the thought that surfaces isn’t she’s safe now. It’s I never want her to sit in anyone else’s passenger seat. The possessiveness of it shocks me. That’s not a protector’s instinct. That’s something else. Something I’m not ready to look at directly, like staring into the floodlights during warm-up.
The A84 stretches ahead. Dark fields, darker hills. The rain eases into mist.
‘How long are we staying?’ Her thin voice breaks the silence. ‘I don’t have anywhere to be. I don’t have to be in Glasgow every day, but I do need to train.’ A shaky breath. ‘Oh God. What happened?’
I don’t have an answer. Not one that fits into words.
As I reach for the gear stick, she takes my hand first. And I hold it as softly as I can.
Chapter 14
Ava
Scottie’s knuckles are crusted dark where the skin split two hours ago. I’m holding the hand that unmade my boyfriend’s jaw.
Ex-boyfriend.
The wipers tick patiently against the windscreen, and somewhere behind my breastbone, a small animal is clawing its way out. It’s about two hours since we pulled away from King’s Park, and my body hasn’t caught up with the geography. I’m still bracing for the door to splinter. My ears still strain for footsteps that are now seventy-five miles away and fading.
Scottie doesn’t speak. He draws slow circles on the back of my hand, and I count them because counting is control. Five. Six. Seven. Eight.
The shame presses against my windpipe. I’m the midnight text that dragged him from his flat. I’m the reason his hand looks like it lost a fight with a slab of concrete.
Mist creeps in from Ben Cruachan, pale tendrils reaching across the tarmac in the dark. The quiet between us is thick, but not wrong. Scottie has always understood silence. It’s one of the reasons I kept sitting beside him in The Wallace, week after week.
‘Well…’ My voice scrapes out dry. ‘That will take a few years of therapy.’
Then we both laugh – his is startled, mine a strange grunt-giggle that threatens to turn into a sob. At least the sound loosens the rusted vice clamped around my diaphragm that’s been tightening since I moved in with Nevin.
‘Weirdly,’ I say, ‘that’s not how any of those films ever end.’
He keeps his eyes on the road. ‘Aye, well. Usually, the villain’s still conscious for the dramatic finale.’
‘And the heroine doesn’t usually leave in the middle of the night, kidnapping a coffee machine. That’s unheard of in romance films.’
‘Too bad. That was the best bit.’
I catch the sliver of a smile crossing his lips. It’s the first real expression I’ve seen on his face since he burst through the door. Or kicked it in. Or whatever he did while I was curled on the bathroom floor, counting the cracks in the grout.
The banter fades, and the weight of the night settles back around us, heavier than before.
‘It wasn’t always like that.’ I don’t even know why I’m still making excuses. ‘Nevin, I mean. At the start, he was charming and funny. He’d text first thing every morning and drive an hour out of his way to see me for twenty minutes. I thought I’d found someone who actually wanted me around. Not as a convenience or a burden. Just…me.’
‘What changed?’
‘I moved in.’ The answer is too simple and too true. ‘Once I was in his flat, in his space, he didn’t have to chase me anymore. And the version of him that chased started showing up less and less. The other version, the one who needed to control everything, who couldn’t stand it if I talked to anyone else or had a thought he hadn’t approved first, that version moved in with us.’
