Page 22 of Fierce Highland Longing

Firelight is not kind to most things, and it was kind to this. Dark, close, dense, so black it took the light and gave nothing up. Warm through my hands the way a loaf is warm. And under the surface that slow knock, on and on.

“This is yours. I’m not keeping it.”

He sat forward and put his eyes on it.

He didn’t reach for it.

I waited. The fire cracked and settled, and I waited some more, and he sat three feet from the thing he’d told me he’d die without, and he did not put his hand out.

Then he sat back and looked across the room, and left it lying in the middle of the table.

He wasn’t going to make me do it.

I’d come down that staircase at half nine at night after the strangest day of my life, and I’d put the whole of a man’s future on a table, and he’d worked out—inside about two seconds—that a person who decides a thing like that at a fire might feel differently at breakfast. So he left it there. He wasn’t going to close a hand round it while I could still change my mind.

Six years I spent with a man who booked the flowers.

I loved him a little for that.

“What will you do?” I got the bottle of wine and poured for both of us. “After?”

He started to say something and stopped before the first word was out.

“I’d like to go and see if there’s anybody left.”

“Left?”

“Nineteen years is a long while in the water. There were four of us the same year.” He turned the glass. “There’ll be nobody who remembers what I sound like.”

“They’ll remember you.”

“Aye, well.” The nearest thing to a smile he does. “I’d settle for the water. I’ve stood beside it that long I’ve forgotten what it does when you’re in it.”

“What’ll you miss?”

He took that seriously, which nobody ever does.

“Bread.”

“Bread.”

“You’ve nothing like it down there. And the wireless. And a dog I knew in 1971.”

“You had a dog?”

“He wasn’t mine. He belonged to a man at Rosehearty who didn’t want him, and he sat outside a boathouse with me for two winters.” He drank. “Black thing, one ear up. He’d not come near me for a month, and then he’d not leave off me.”

“What was his name?”

“The man called him Dog.”

“That’s the worst name I’ve ever heard.”

“He answered to it. I’d have thought less of him if he hadn’t.”

I was laughing into my glass with my elbows on the table by then. That was the best hour I’d had in six years. Six years, and it was a peat fire and a bottle of wine and a man telling me about a dog called Dog.

The door opened.