“Contested. I was trying to warn you. Before Mackie moved. The Winter Wager was coming and I knew – from the shell company records, from the funding patterns – that Mackie was going to use the Wager as a mechanism. I didn’t know what the mechanism would be. I knew it was coming.”
I sat with this. The café was warm. The coffee was cooling. My sister had been in the vault of the Gilded Table eighteen months ago, reading the Ledger by lamplight, writing warnings in gold ink beside the name of a woman she had never met because the woman was important to her brother.
“The warehouse,” I said.
She nodded. “I left the note in the warehouse. The one taped to the wall beside the chair. I found your man – Alastair – tied to the chair. I freed his hands.” She paused. “I didn’t introduce myself. He was concussed. He wouldn’t have remembered a face. But I cut the ties on his wrists and I left a note and I walked out the back before anyone came.”
“He remembered the hands. He said someone cut the ties.”
“That was me.”
I sat with this. My sister had been in the warehouse. During the abduction. She had found Al – bound, concussed, alone in the dark – and she had freed his hands and walked out. She had been in the building. She had been close enough to touch someone I loved and she had touched him and saved him and disappeared.
The café was hushed in the space between us, even though the café was not quiet at all. The noise of the room – the conversations, the coffee machine, the clatter of cups – existedat a distance. Between us was the silence of two people who were reconstructing six years of absence into a shape that made sense.
“You have people worth protecting,” Cat said. Her voice was steady. “I wanted to make sure you knew what was coming.”
She showed me a postcard. Cairndhu harbour. The image I had sent her – the one photograph I had managed to get to her through the single address I had, before the address went dead.
“I always knew I was coming back,” she said.
She held the postcard. The corners were soft from handling. The harbour image was faded. She had been carrying it for years – in pockets, in briefcases, in the spaces between the names she used and the life she was building.
“I know,” I said. “That’s the only way I didn’t go mad.”
She looked at me. I looked at her. The café was warm. The coffee was cold. The ordinary Tuesday was doing its ordinary business and in the corner of a small café off Buchanan Street, a brother and a sister were sitting across from each other for the first time in six years, and the six years were between them and beside them and behind them, and the weight of them was real.
She put her hand on the table. I put mine on top of it. The contact was the first touch in six years. Her hand was warm. Her ring was cold – the silver band on her right hand, the ring she had bought herself, the ring of a woman who had learned to hold her own hand. I held on.
She held on.
The café did its business around us. The coffee machine hissed. A student laughed at a table by the window. The woman with the pram steered towards the door. The ordinary worldcontinued its ordinary rotation and in the corner, two people sat with their hands touching and six years dissolving between them – not disappearing, the years were real, the distance was real, the pain was real – but dissolving into a shape that could be carried jointly rather than alone.
“Come home,” I said.
She looked at me. Her eyes were clear. Her hand was steady in mine.
“Not yet,” she said. “There’s one more thing I need to do in Glasgow. One more piece of the picture. Then I’ll come.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
I accepted this. I accepted it because Cat had earned the right to her own timeline, and because six years of absence had taught me that love was not the same as proximity, and sometimes the most loving thing you could do for someone was to let them finish what they had started.
We stayed like that for a long time. The café emptied. The afternoon light changed. The coffee went cold. My sister’s hand was in mine and the melody she had left on her voicemail was playing in my head and the four bars of music were enough. They were everything.
CHAPTER 23
What Catriona Knows
MORVEN
They are silent in the way of people who have received information that is too large to react to immediately. The fire is going. Nobody has touched their tea.
The dining room. Evening. The long table that Lachlan’s mother had bought in Edinburgh – mahogany, eight seats, the surface scarred with forty years of use. Ewan was standing at the head of the table. He had returned from Glasgow two hours ago and he had showered and changed and eaten and done all the ordinary things, and then he had asked us to sit, and we sat, and he told us what Catriona knew.
Mackie’s buyer was not a crime operation. Not a rival syndicate. Not a property developer or a corporate raider or any of the threats we had been preparing for.
