Chapter 5: The Edinburgh Interlude
The train delay announcement crackled through the station speakers, a dry, automated voice slicing through the bustle. “...service to Edinburgh Waverley is now expected to depart at 16:47. We apologize for any inconvenience.” An hour and a half. Just enough time for the shock of leaving to wear off and the hollow dread of what came next to settle in its place.
Danielle stood under the vast, arched ceiling of Inverness station, her duffel bag at her feet. The adrenaline that had propelled her from the castle, through the frosty courtyard and into the taxi, had dissipated entirely. She felt unmoored. The plan—the clean, surgical exit—now gaped with this idle hour.She couldn’t just stand here. The station was too full of purposeful movement, of reunions and departures that felt like mockeries.
She shouldered her bag and followed the trickle of delayed passengers out a side door, seeking the neutral ground of a cafe. The biting air hit her, sharper here in the city than in the sheltered glen. It was a commercial street, lined with generic shops, but across the road, a narrow alley promised the glow of a pub sign. The Grouse & Thistle. It looked ancient, its black-painted wood and frosted windows a world away from the airport lounge she’d inhabit later. She needed a wall between her and the chill, both outside and in.
Inside, it was all dark wood and low ceilings, the air warm with the smell of yeast, old smoke, and simmering gravy. A few afternoon drinkers, older men with lined faces and flat caps, glanced up as she entered, then returned to their papers and quiet talk.It was profoundly, blessedly anonymous. She found a small table tucked by the hearth, where a peat fire smoldered, and shrugged off her coat. The weight of her bag thudded against the flagstone floor.
A young woman with a tired smile took her order for a whisky, neat.“Any particular?” she asked.
“Whatever’s local,” Danielle mumbled, not meeting her eyes.The drink arrived, a deep amber in a sturdy glass. She wrapped her hands around it, the heat seeping into her palms. She took a sip, letting the slow fire burn a path down her throat, hoping it would cauterize something inside. She stared into the hearth, watching a particular piece of peat glow orange, then crumble into grey ash. This was it.The in-between space.Neither here nor there. Just a woman in a pub, waiting for a train to take her to a plane to take her back to a life that had stopped fitting.She didn’t hear the stool scrape back beside her. She only sensed a presence, a shift in the light, and then a voice, laced with a familiar Highland lilt but warmer, lighter than the one that haunted her.
“That’s a lonely-looking drink for a stranger in a strange pub.”
She turned. The man on the next stool was smiling at her, but it wasn’t the predatory smile of a pickup. It was open, curious, with a touch of amusement in vibrant green eyes. He had auburn hair, a shade lighter than Callum’s, and a face that was handsome in a less severe way, etched with laugh lines rather than grim responsibility. He wore a dark wool jacket over a rumpled crewneck, a camera bag slung across his chest.
“I’m not a stranger,” she said, the words coming out more defensive than she intended.“Aren’t you? I’ve never seen you in here before. And I make a point of knowing the patrons of all the best Inverness establishments.” He gestured around the nearly empty pub, his grin widening. “This one’s in my top twenty.”
Despite herself, a faint, weary smile touched her lips. “You must get out a lot.”
“I get around.Wildlife photographer.” He tapped his camera bag. “Just back from a stint in the Cairngorms. Frozen my arse off waiting for a golden eagle that decided to be fashionably late.” He extended a hand.“Finn. Finn MacTavish.”
The name hit her like a physical blow.The air left her lungs. The warmth from the whisky vanished, replaced by a cold flush.MacTavish. The eyes, now that she looked, were a different shape, a different green, but the resemblance was there in the set of the shoulders, the strong line of the jaw.He saw the recognition, and the understanding, in her face. His easy smile softened, turned conspiratorial.“Aye.That MacTavish. Morag might have given me a heads-up.”
“Morag,” Danielle repeated, the name a dull thud.Of course.The steadfast sentinel. The meddling, wonderful, infuriating old woman.
“She’s worried about you,” Finn said, his tone shifting, the charm dialed back to something more genuine.“Called me this morning. Said an American lass with a broken heart and a bad cough was fleeing the country via the 10:15, and could I maybe, I don’t know, perform an intercept?” He signalled the barmaid for two more of whatever Danielle was having. “She said you looked like you were going to your own funeral in that taxi.”
Danielle looked down at her hands, clenched around the now-empty glass. The embarrassment was a live wire.“I inconvenienced everyone. I just needed to stop being a burden.”
“Burden?” Finn chuckled, but it wasn’t unkind. “Is that what you think you were? Morag’s been bored out of her skull for years with just my dour brother for company. You were the most exciting thing to happen at that castle since the plumbing was updated.Briefly.”
The new whiskies arrived.Finn raised his. “Slàinte.To not running when things get interesting.”
She didn’t clink his glass. “It wasn’t interesting.It was mortifying.”
“Because you got sick? Or because you mistook my brother for your shitbag ex-husband?”
She flinched. “Morag told you that, too.”
“She tells me everything. She’s my chief intelligence officer.” He took a sip, studying her over the rim of his glass. “You know, for a cybersecurity analyst, you’re terrible at firewalls. Your tells are all over your face.”
“Why are you here, Finn?” The question came out flat, exhausted.
“Because Morag asked me to check on you.And because I’m curious.” He leaned an elbow on the bar. “Callum’s been… different.Since you left. And not in a ‘thank God that’s over’ way.In a ‘walking around with a storm cloud where his head should be’ way. Worse than usual, even.”
Danielle felt a stubborn prickling behind her eyes. She refused to let it win.“He probably just wants his glove back.I left it on the chair. I meant to give it to Morag.” It was a pathetic attempt to reduce it all to a forgotten belonging.
Finn went very still.He set his glass down with deliberate care. “You left it on the chair.”
“Yes.The work glove.From when he… when he was there. During the fever.”
A slow, incredulous smile spread across Finn’s face. “Oh, this is brilliant.”
“What?”
“He found it.The morning after you left. Picked it up from that chair. And as far as I know, it hasn’t left his pocket since.”
The noise of the pub faded—the clink of glass, the murmur of voices, the hiss of the fire.All she could hear was the whoosh of her own blood in her ears. The image was absurd, and yet violently clear: Callum, that severe, guarded man, his hand slipping into his pocket, his fingers closing over a worn, mud-stained glove. A stupid, insignificant piece of leather that connected him to a night of helpless vigilance, to a woman who had begged another man not to leave.“He’s carrying it?” The words were a whisper.
“Like a holy relic.Or a particularly grim lucky charm. I saw him pull it out yesterday, absentmindedly, while he was looking at the loch.Just… held it. Then shoved it back like it burned him.” Finn’s gaze was sharp, all the prior levity gone. “That’s not the behavior of a man who’s relieved a burden is gone, Danielle. That’s the behavior of a man who’s lost one.”
The train announcement echoed distantly from the station across the street, a muffled reminder of her escape route.Her flight was booked.Her apartment waited. The entire sensible architecture of her retreat was constructed and signed off on.
But now there was a crack in the foundation. A single, stubborn, illogical fact: a man who owed her nothing was carrying a piece of her inadvertent leaving in his pocket.
“I don’t know what to do with that information,” she admitted, her voice raw.
“You don’t have to do anything with it,” Finn said gently. “You can get on your train, then your plane, and go back to Seattle. You can block this whole misadventure as a weird, fever-dream blip.That’s a valid choice.” He finished his whisky. “Or you could wonder why you’re running so fast from a place that, for all its drama, actually tried to take care of you. Even if the caretaker is grumpy and terrible at showing it.”
He stood up, slinging his camera bag over his shoulder.“My train’s actually on time. I’m headed back to Edinburgh.” He fished a card from his wallet and placed it on the bar beside her.It had his name, a phone number, and an email. “That’s me.If you need anything.A guide. A translator for my brother’s particular brand of scowling silence. Or just a friend in Scotland who doesn’t think you’re a burden.”
He gave her shoulder a brief, brotherly squeeze. “Think about the glove, Danielle.It’s a pretty shitty metaphor, but sometimes life isn’t poetic. Sometimes it’s just a dirty, practical thing that keeps a hand warm.”
And then he was gone, weaving through the tables and out the pub door, leaving her alone with the smoldering peat and the two unfinished whiskies.She picked up his card.The paper was thick, textured. A wildlife photographer.Callum’s brother.A thread back to the glen she had just severed.
The final boarding call for her train would come soon. The automated voice would list the platform, urge passengers to make their way. It was the sound of the path of least resistance, the script she had written for herself.Her fingers traced the edge of the card. She saw the empty chair by her sickbed.She saw Callum’s frozen profile in the dawn courtyard. And now, superimposed over it all, a new image: his broad, capable hand, not wiping her brow, but tucked in his pocket, clenched around a worn piece of leather.It changed nothing. And it changed everything.She didn’t move when the next delay announcement came. She simply sat in the growing dark of the pub, the frost forming delicate feathers on the window beside her, holding Finn MacTavish’s card until the edges softened with her warmth, while the train to Edinburgh, and the life that lay beyond it, waited on a cold metal track just across the street.
The frost feathers bloomed, intricate and cold, across the pub window. Inside, her own reflection grew clearer as the daylight died—a pale woman holding a rectangle of cardstock like a verdict. The train would leave. Her suitcase, that stupid, half-emptied duffel by her feet, was a commitment. Seattle held rain she understood, an apartment devoid of ghosts, a career built on firewalls and predictable code. It was safe. It was a retreat she had earned.
But safety tasted like ash now. It tasted like the lingering peat smoke in this pub, like the dregs of whisky she couldn’t finish. Finn’s words rewound in her head. He’s carrying it. A glove. A dirty, practical, utterly unimportant object. Callum MacTavish, a laird with a thousand acres of responsibility, was pocketing a piece of forgotten evidence from her catastrophic vulnerability. Why? Pity didn’t fit. Annoyance wouldn’t cherish a trophy. The ambiguity of it was a hook in her ribs, pulling against every instinct to flee.
“Last call for the 16:47 to Edinburgh, platform three.” The barmaid’s voice, loud and clear, severed her paralysis.
Danielle stood. Her legs were stiff. She shoved Finn’s card into her back pocket, shouldered her duffel, and pushed out of the pub door. The cold was a slap, stealing her breath. Across the street, the station’s lights glowed yellow in the deep blue twilight. People streamed toward the doors, hats pulled low, steps quickening against the chill. Platform three. It was right there.
She didn’t cross toward the station. She turned left, walking swiftly along the slick pavement, her breath pluming. She passed a closed bookstore, a charity shop, a kebab place emitting greasy warmth. She walked until the crowd thinned and the noise of the station faded to a distant hum. She stopped under the amber glow of a streetlamp, its light casting a brittle circle on the frost-heaved sidewalk.
Her hands were shaking. From cold, from the residue of fever, from a decision that felt like stepping off a cliff. She pulled out her phone. The screen was a portal to her old life: messages from colleagues about a project timeline, a spam email, the weather for Seattle—rain, 8°C. She opened her contacts. His number was still there, entered the day he’d driven her to the doctor. Callum MacTavish. She stared at it until the letters blurred.
She pressed call.
It rang. Once, twice. The sound was loud in the silent street. Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic, trapped bird. What was she doing? This was insane. He was probably in the stable, or eating supper, annoyed by the interruption.
A click. The connection opened. There was no greeting. Just the faint, static-laced sound of an open line and, she thought, the whisper of wind.
“Hello?” Her voice came out thin, strained.
A pause. Then his. “Danielle.” He didn’t sound surprised. He sounded… expectant. Guarded. The single word was a depth charge, sending vibrations through her.
“Yeah.” She swallowed, gripping the phone. “It’s me. I’m… I’m in Inverness. At the station.” She winced. Why was she giving him a location? Why was she talking like she was reporting in?
Another pause. She could hear the distinct sound of a door closing, the ambient noise behind him cutting off. He’d moved somewhere private. “Your train’s delayed.” It wasn’t a question.
“You heard?”
“Morag has the schedule pinned to the kitchen board.” A dry, almost imperceptible note in his voice. “She’s been… monitoring.”
Of course she had. “Look,” Danielle began, the words tangling. “I left something. In the room.”
Silence. Then, “What.”
“A glove. Your work glove. I meant to give it to Morag. I forgot.” She was rambling. “Finn told me you found it.”
His breath came through the line, a soft, sharp intake. “My brother talks too much.”
“So it’s true.” She leaned against the cold stone wall of a building, needing the support. “You have it.”
“It’s my glove.” Defensive. Gruff.
“Why are you carrying it around?” The question hung in the frozen air, blunt and terrifyingly direct.
The silence this time was different. It stretched, filled only by the faint rustle of his movement. When he spoke, his voice was lower, scraped raw. “I don’t know.”
The honesty of it disarmed her completely. It was three words, utterly unadorned. No justification. No gruff dismissal. Just a confession of pure, bewildered possession.
“I’m standing outside the station,” she said, her own voice dropping to match his. “My train leaves in fifteen minutes.”
“I see.”
“Do you want it back?” She wasn’t talking about the glove anymore. They both knew it.
He didn’t answer right away. She heard him shift, imagined him in his study, perhaps, or the kitchen, that glove a heavy lump in his pocket. “You paid Morag,” he said, abruptly. “She gave me the envelope.”
“I owed you.”
“You didn’t.” The words were final. “A guest doesn’t owe for care when they’re ill. That’s not how it works here.”
“How does it work here, Callum?” Her frustration leaked through, mingled with a desperate need to understand. “Because I got sick and I fell apart and I said things I didn’t mean to say to you, and then I left. That seems like a pretty clear transaction of failure and retreat.”
“You didn’t fail.” The intensity in his voice made her jerk the phone closer to her ear. “You were ill. And you left because you were embarrassed. There’s a difference.”
“And the glove?”
A long, taut silence. She could practically feel him wrestling with it, this man of land and stone and unspoken loyalties. “It was on the chair,” he said, each word measured, heavy. “After you were gone. It was… a thing that was out of place.” Another pause. “My world is ordered. Things have a place. That didn’t.”
“So you put it in your pocket.”
“So I put it in my pocket.” He echoed her, a quiet admission.
Across the street, the station speaker crackled again. She couldn’t make out the words, but the cadence was unmistakable: a final boarding call. The 16:47 was ready to depart. The doors would be closing. The train would glide out, carrying the version of her that knew how to run, south toward Edinburgh and escape.
She looked at the glowing entrance, then down at the frost between her boots.
“My train’s leaving,” she whispered into the phone.
“Aye.” His reply was just a breath.
“Callum.” Her eyes squeezed shut. “If I don’t get on it… what happens?”
The line was so quiet she wondered if he’d hung up. Then his voice came through, stripped bare of all its usual reserve, just a raw, quiet truth. “I’ll come and get you.”
Three words. I’ll come and get you. Not you can come back. Not we’ll figure it out. A simple, decisive action. An answer to the question she hadn’t known how to ask.
A shudder ran through her, part terror, part relief so profound it felt like collapse. She opened her eyes. She watched the last few passengers sprint through the station doors. She saw the clock above the entrance tick forward.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay?”
“Don’t come into the station. It’s… chaotic. I’ll be at the pub across the street. The Grouse and Thistle.”
Another pause, shorter this time. “I know it. Forty minutes.”
“I’ll be here.” She ended the call before her courage failed.
Her hand fell to her side, the phone suddenly heavy. The speaker across the way gave one last, muffled announcement. She turned her back on the station entrance. She walked, not with the frantic energy of escape, but with the slow, deliberate steps of someone walking into an unknown country. The duffel bag bumped against her leg, no longer a symbol of flight, but just a bag. She re-entered the pub, the warmth and smell enveloping her like a embrace.
The barmaid looked up, surprised. “Miss your train?”
“Yes,” Danielle said, and it wasn’t a confession of failure. It was a statement of fact. She returned to her table by the hearth, now empty, and sat down. She ordered a coffee. Then she just waited, watching the frost deepen on the window, until the world outside was completely dark, and the only thing left was the sound of the fire, and the certain, terrifying knowledge of his approaching headlights in the night.
Then she just waited, watching the frost deepen on the window, until the world outside was completely dark, and the only thing left was the sound of the fire, and the certain, terrifying knowledge of his approaching headlights in the night.
The coffee cooled untouched. Every set of headlights that swept past the pub window made her stomach contract. She tracked them as they brightened the frost-furred glass, held her breath, and let it out when they slid away into the dark. This was a new kind of waiting. Before, she had been waiting to leave. Now, she was waiting to be found.
Morag’s oatcakes sat in their grease-paper package. She untied the string and ate one mechanically, the coarse texture and hearty sweetness a tangible kindness. It grounded her. The simple act of chewing, of swallowing, reminded her body it was here, in this chair, and not lost in some fever dream or airport limbo.
A large, mud-splattered Land Rover slid to a halt outside, its diesel engine rumbling. The headlights cut off, plunging the street back into amber-lit gloom. The driver’s door opened. Her breath caught. A tall, broad-shouldered figure emerged, barely visible in the shadows. He stood for a moment beside the vehicle, as if steeling himself. Then he turned and pushed open the pub door.
The cold rushed in ahead of him, a brief, sharp invader. Then the door swung shut, sealing the warmth back in. Callum stood just inside, his eyes scanning the dim room. They found her instantly. He was still wearing the same heavy sweater from the morning, no coat, his dark auburn hair wind-tousled. He looked like he’d come straight from the land, from some urgent task interrupted.
He walked toward her. The few other patrons glanced up, registered his presence with faint nods, and looked away. His boots were quiet on the stone floor. He stopped by her table, his presence immediately altering the space, making it feel smaller, more charged.
“You’re here,” he said. His voice was low.
“I’m here.” She gestured vaguely to the other chair. “You made good time.”
“The roads were clear.” He didn’t sit immediately. He was looking at her, really looking, as if verifying her solidity. “You didn’t get on the train.”
“No.”
A simple, monumental fact hung between them. He finally pulled the chair out and sat, the movement weary. He nodded toward her duffel bag. “You’re packed.”
“I was packed.”
He gave a slow, single nod, mirroring the gesture from the courtyard. It seemed to be his punctuation for unspoken things. The barmaid came over. He ordered a pint of heavy, his request soft. The normalcy of the act was surreal.
“Finn found me,” Danielle said, needing to fill the silence. “In here, earlier.”
Callum’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. “I imagined he might. He has a radar for complication.”
“He was kind. He said Morag sent him.”
“Morag manages everything she cannot directly control.” A flicker of something—exasperation, fondness—crossed his face. His drink arrived. He took a long pull, then set the pint glass down with deliberate care. “He told you about the glove.”
“He did.”
“And that’s why you called.” It wasn’t quite a question.
“Part of it. Mostly, I called because I realized running away felt exactly the same there,” she pointed toward the station, “as it did here.” She tapped her chest lightly. “The geography wasn’t fixing it.”
He absorbed that, his gaze fixed on the condensation sliding down his glass. “You don’t have to run from here.”
“I think I do. I’m a guest who overstayed a dramatic welcome.” She tried for a light tone; it fell flat.
“You were ill.” He looked up, and his blue eyes were direct, unnerving. “It wasn’t dramatic. It was… concerning. There’s a difference.”
“When I grabbed your wrist,” she said, the memory tightening her throat. “When I called you James. That wasn’t concerning. That was… humiliating.”
He was silent for a long moment. “You were burning up. You weren’t yourself.”
“But I was.” The admission shocked her with its truth. “That’s the worst part. I was this raw, needy version of myself I keep locked away. And you saw it. You had to sit through it.”
He leaned forward, his elbows on the table. The gesture was uncharacteristically casual, breaking his usual rigid posture. “Danielle. Listen to me. I’ve sat through calving seasons where the cows screamed for hours. I’ve held a man’s leg together while we waited for the air ambulance. I’ve seen my share of raw.” He held her gaze. “Your raw wasn’t a burden. It was just… human. It didn’t frighten me.”
The word frighten seemed to hang in the air. She realized, with sudden clarity, that her vulnerability hadn’t scared him—but his own response to it might have.
“Then why the glove?” she asked softly.
He exhaled, a long, slow breath. His hand went to his pocket, hesitated, and then withdrew. He placed the worn leather work glove on the table between them. It was creased, the palm darkened with old sweat and soil. An utterly ordinary object. It looked small and insignificant lying there.
“I found it,” he said, his voice rough. “After you’d gone. It was the only thing out of place in that room. Morag had stripped the bed, cleared the basin, everything was clean and empty. But that was there.” He didn’t touch it. He just looked at it. “It wasn’t pity. It wasn’t a relic. I put it in my pocket without thinking. And then I kept forgetting to take it out.”
She stared at the glove, then back at his face, which was etched with a reluctant honesty. “Forgot?”
“Aye. I’d put my hand in my pocket and feel it. And remember.” He paused, choosing his words with visible effort. “I’d remember that for a few hours, in the middle of the night, I wasn’t alone in that big, quiet house. There was someone else to be responsible for. Someone else’s breath to listen for. It was… a change.”
The confession was stark. It laid bare his loneliness more plainly than any complaint could have. He missed the weight of care. He missed not being alone.
“You could get a dog,” she said, the words escaping before she could stop them.
A surprised, gruff sound escaped him—almost a laugh. “I have a dog. He’s useless. Sleeps by the Aga and farts.”
A real, genuine smile broke through her tension. “Loyal, though.”
“Aye, loyal.” He looked at her, and the guardedness in his eyes had softened into something warmer, more weary. “So you’re not getting on a train tonight.”
“It would appear not.”
“And your flight?”
“I’ll change it. Or eat the cost. I haven’t decided.”
He nodded. He reached out, his fingers hovering over the glove for a second before he picked it up. He turned it over in his broad hand, then tucked it back into his pocket. The action felt like a period at the end of a sentence. “You should come back, then. At least until you’re fully recovered. Morag will be pleased. She’s been sighing over her soup pot all afternoon, claiming it’s gone off.”
“She’s a terrible liar.”
“The worst.” He finished his pint. “Are you ready?”
The question was simple. Was she ready to go back? To the cavernous room, the howling glen, the kind but sharp-eyed housekeeper, and this complicated, reserved man who carried forgotten gloves in his pocket? The safety of Seattle was a phantom now, a faded postcard.
“Yes,” she said. She stood, slinging her duffel over her shoulder. It felt lighter.
He stood as well, dropping some notes on the table. Together, they walked toward the door. He reached it first and held it open for her. The cold was a violent embrace after the pub’s warmth. She hurried toward the passenger side of the Land Rover. He unlocked it with a click of the fob.
She climbed in. The interior smelled powerfully of him—of wool, damp earth, clean straw, and a hint of dog. It was familiar now. He got in the driver’s side, the vehicle dipping under his weight. He started the engine, but didn’t immediately put it in gear. He just sat, his hands on the wheel, staring through the windshield at the dark street.
“I’m glad you called,” he said, the words directed ahead into the night.
“I’m glad you came.”
He put the truck in gear and pulled away from the curb. The pub’s warm glow disappeared behind them. They drove in silence through the lit streets of Inverness, the earlier tension replaced by a fragile, shared quiet. The road ahead was dark, leading back into the hills, toward the loch and the castle and all its unspoken histories. She leaned her head against the cold window, watching the last of the city lights fall away, and felt not the panic of retreat, but the steady, unnerving pull of a story unfinished.
HE ARRIVES.