“Sit down,” she said.
I sat. The table was small. The coffee cups were between us. Hers untouched. Mine ordered and arriving – the waitress placed it in front of me and I did not look at her because I could not look at anyone except Cat.
She was thinner. Not unhealthily – the thinness of a woman who moved a great deal and ate when she remembered and did not always remember. Her skin was clear. Her hands were strong – dancer’s hands, the tendons visible, the fingers long. She was wearing a ring on her right hand that I did not recognise – a simple band, silver, the kind of ring a woman buys for herself.
“I’m not going to justify it,” she said. “What I did. Leaving. Not contacting you. I’m going to explain it, and the explanation may not be enough, and that’s my responsibility to carry.”
“Go ahead.”
She told it in order. Cat had always been orderly – the dancer’s discipline applied to narrative. She sat across from me with her hands around the coffee cup and she spoke in the low, steady voice of a woman who had rehearsed this story in her head a thousand times and was now delivering it to the one audience that mattered.
After she lost the ballet role – the audition that Morven won, the one that Isobel had prepared both of them for – she had the slow-burn kind of breakdown. The quiet kind, the kind where you stop being able to locate yourself in the world. You get up and you go to work and you teach classes and you eat and you sleep and you do all the mechanical things, and none of them have weight, and the weightlessness is the breakdown. You are functioning. You are not present.
“I didn’t lose it because Morven was better,” she said. “Morven was better. I knew that. I’d known it since we were fourteen. The loss wasn’t about Morven. The loss was about me – about the fact that I had built my entire identity around a single skill, and when the skill wasn’t enough, the identity collapsed. I didn’t know who I was if I wasn’t the dancer who was going to get the role.”
She went to Glasgow. She found a job teaching ballet to children at a community centre. She rented a flat in the West End – a bedsit, small, with a view of a car park and a radiator that rattled. She started again. She did not contact me.
“I was ashamed,” she said. Her voice was quiet and precise. “Not of the breakdown. Of needing you. I had spent my entire life being Ewan Alloway’s sister. The Fixer’s Cat. Isobel’sstudent. I didn’t know who I was without those identities, and I needed to find out, and the finding-out required distance.”
“Six years of distance.”
“The first two were the distance. I taught children. I choreographed small productions. I built a life that was mine – not Ewan’s sister’s life, not Isobel’s student’s life, mine. I found friends who didn’t know the Syndicate existed. I found a version of myself that could stand without a barre or a brother to lean on.” She paused. “The last four were different.”
“Different how?”
She looked at her coffee. She picked it up. She drank. The drinking was a decision – the decision to continue, to tell the part that was not about shame but about choice.
“I discovered what Mackie was doing,” she said. “Not through the Syndicate. Through my own work. The community centre where I taught was funded by one of his shell companies. I recognised the financial structure from Dad’s work – the way the money moved, the way the funding was contingent on cooperation, the way the generosity had conditions.”
“You built a picture.”
“I built a picture. The same picture Rona built, from the opposite end. I mapped the charitable funding network – not because I’m an accountant, because I’m not. Because I sat in a community centre watching the management make decisions that didn’t serve the children, and I started asking why, and the why led me to the funding, and the funding led me to Ardmore, and Ardmore led me to Mackie.” She drank her coffee. “I traced the shell companies. I found the connection to Cairndhu. And I realised that the man who was funding the community centre where I taught ballet to five-year-olds was the same man who was trying to dismantle the structure that protected the town I grew up in.”
“So you came back.”
“Not immediately. I spent a year understanding what Mackie was building. I read the planning applications. I tracked the property acquisitions. I attended three of his charity events – the corporate dinners, the black-tie fundraisers, the rooms full of councillors and solicitors and harbour board members. I went as a guest. I watched. I learned.”
She looked at me. Her eyes were clear. The watchfulness was gone. What replaced it was the thing beneath the watchfulness – the person she had become in the years away. Certain. Capable. A woman who had started by running from herself and had ended by running towards the fight.
“I came back to Cairndhu eighteen months ago,” she said. “One night. I saw Niamh. I asked about you.”
“I know. Niamh told us.”
“I wrote the red entries,” she said. “And the word in gold beside Morven’s entry. Contested. I was trying to warn you before Mackie moved.”
The wordContestedhad haunted the Winter Wager. It had sat beside Morven’s name in the Ledger – a single word, written in gold ink, unsigned, unexplained. Lachlan had treated it as an anomaly. I had looked at it and wondered who had cared enough about a woman I was going to fall in love with to write a warning beside her name before I knew her.
My sister. My sister had written it.
The sentence landed. I put my coffee down. The café continued its ordinary business around us – the students, the office workers, the woman with the pram. The world was having lunch. My sister was telling me she had been inside the Ledger.
“The red entries in the Ledger. The unresolved debts flagged with red ink. Some of those were mine. I identified the debts that were connected to Mackie’s network and I flagged them. I went to the vault.” She paused. “Niamh gave me access. One night. Two hours.”
“You were in the vault.”
“I was in the vault. I read the Ledger. I flagged the entries I could identify. And I wrote one word in gold beside Morven’s entry.”
“Contested.”
