Page 80 of Scotlander

‘So, why are you two here? For real?’ Fenella asked, holding a ‘talk to the hand’ palm up in front of a visibly upset ChiChi.

Gabe looked to Willa. She shrugged. Go ahead.

‘My sister died. She loved us both and wanted us to find something.’

‘What?’ Jules asked, truly interested. ‘Are you both Scottish?’

Gabe gave her a look at me, this towering example of manhood is obviously pure Latino face then said, ‘She sent me here to let me know our family didn’t hate me for being gay.’

Jules threw her hands up in a preach gesture, then gave her mum a cuddle.

‘The whole Lachlan reunion was . . .’ He scratched at his throat. ‘It was to remind me how good it felt to be in love.’

‘And are you two, like, hooking up?’ Fenella’s voice was more hopeful than anything. Grateful not to be the only one with a screwed-up love life.

Gabe shrugged. ‘I don’t know. His life’s here, mine is . . . mine is . . .’ His eyes moved to Willa’s. She got it. His used to be set in stone and now maybe that he wasn’t hiding from the world, perhaps it’d be different. Perhaps he’d be different.

‘So, why’d she send you, Willa?’

Too many eyes turned to her. She thought of the unopened letter sitting in her room. The one that would be her last ever interaction with Valentina. She made a duh face and said, ‘Scotland superfan!’

It wasn’t entirely a lie. She did like it here. Felt weirdly at home for a place she’d never been to before. Or maybe that was just Balcraigie and the people who made it home. She knew them in the way she knew her own home community. Hard working, honest people who wanted to put some good back into the world.

Which did raise the thorny question: why was she more at home with this version of her family than her own?

Luckily, her comment evoked an impassioned ‘Thank you,’ from Rosa, who aimed a pointed ‘See?’ at a newly arrived Jeff. ‘I’m not the only one who thinks Texas is not the best stand-in for the mother country.’

Jeff took umbrage, and an impassioned debate on the state of LARPing in America ensued.

Later, after Scottish fajitas and a fair amount of acrimonious conversation made it clear they’d reached the point in their immersive experience where they were getting on one another’s nerves, Willa heaved the basket of dirty plates and cutlery on to her hip, headed out of the courtyard and up the path towards the house. It was a longer walk than she’d anticipated and made her appreciate, yet again, just how hard Orla worked. And with a smile throughout.

When she got to the house, no one answered her knock, so she walked round the back where she found the kitchen door open. She took a step inside.

It looked like a hurricane had hit it. The huge trays of lasagne they’d eaten like wolves the night before were stacked in sloppy piles of dishwashing soap and burnt-on cheese. Trug buckets full of potatoes sat, unpeeled, on the floor. Huge slabs of salmon stuck out of another trug, the pink flesh obscured by frost suggesting they’d just been taken out of a chest freezer. There were heaped baskets of dirty and clean laundry. It was difficult to discern which was which. There were multiple drying racks covered in children’s clothes. Sheets draped on doorframes. On the centre of the round, wooden kitchen table were stacks of paperwork, half-opened mail, an embarrassment of envelopes with bold, red lettering on them, some very serious-looking documents that bore the stamp of an impressive-looking bank, a couple of geriatric laptops, a calculator, an abacus, and a five-litre paint tin filled to overflowing with stub ends of candles. Sitting in a room just beyond the kitchen – the dining room from the looks of the long rectangular table and the formal, high-backed chairs, sat Orla, Dougie, Duncan and Finn. They were completely silent and wore a collective look of shock.

‘Hey, guys.’ She waved, openly freaked out at their tableau. ‘Everything okay?’

Duncan looked at and then through her.

Dougie dropped his head into his hands.

Big, fat tears began skidding down Orla’s cheeks, down her chin and into the knitted shoulder and neck wrap Jennifer had given her that morning with a detailed explanation as to how she’d done it in the MacKenzie clan colours. She wasn’t bothering to wipe them away.

‘Harvester,’ Finn managed, his blue-grey eyes wide with disbelief. ‘We won’t be able to fix the harvester. And the college can’t lend us theirs.’ The look he gave her spoke volumes. They’d run out of options. He got up, walked straight past her, and went outside. A few moments later she heard the whack, whack, whack of his axe cleaving logs into firewood.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Text Messages: Your Message Mailbox is full. Please delete some messages.

Voicemail: Willa. Jenkins. You have . . . one hundred . . . and . . . twelve . . . voice . . . messages. To listen to your . . . messages . . .

Email: You have 137 unread emails.

Chapter Thirty-Five

O, happy days! Bryony, it turned out, had forgotten to tell everyone she was off for a girls’ trip to Hawaii with her mother on the same weekend all of the sweeps-week specials were meant to be filmed.

Rather than firing her (children of senior level executives did not get fired), the production team, in their wisdom, had decided their only option was to turn to Willa to fix it.