Magic of Winter Read online

  And the books? Her mum had found a lot of them at charity shops and jumble sales, scrounging up donations from everyone she met. She’d chosen every book she put on the shelves because she knew there would be someone particular in the glen who would love it. And she hadn’t merely taken the jacket copy or the word of reviewers as gospel, either. She had read each book herself, or skimmed it at least.

  Cait’s father had known all that. Of all people, he knew how much love his wife had poured into the library.

  How could Brice have helped him do this?

  Cait’s jaw set with determination. “You’ll have to find those books and bring them back. I don’t care what you have to do to make that happen. The shelves aren’t as important. If you can get them, too, then so much the better, but if not, just find me shelves to replace them. And stop at the paint shop while you’re at it so we can get rid of all this white. Are you hearing what I’m saying? You helped create this mess, and you’re going to help me put everything back the way it was.” Her voice cracked, and she set her teeth. “This isn’t a favor I’m asking. I’ll pay you for the work, and whatever you have to do to buy everything back again, I’ll pay you for that, too.”

  It was a fine, brave speech, and she was proud of it. So why did she feel like she was begging?

  Because Brice was looking at her with pity.

  “You don’t need the old bookshelves,” he said.

  “I already said that—”

  “No. I mean, I don’t need to find you any bookshelves. I’ll make built-ins for you.” His voice was soft enough that she could barely hear it over the pounding music. “I know where I can get my hands on shelving, and built-ins would make the rooms look bigger. Better.”

  “I don’t want better!” Cait’s nails dug half-moons into her palms. “I just want what was here,” she added more quietly. “It’s all there is left of my mother. There’s nothing else.”

  “Wait!” Brice called as she walked toward the door.

  She stopped. “What?”

  His footsteps creaked toward her, heavy and uneven. Uncharacteristically uncertain. “I didn’t do this to hurt you, Cait. You have to know that. Whatever’s between us, I wouldn’t hurt you.”

  Her back was so stiff the muscles ached. Every fiber, every corner of her ached. “I used to think you wouldn’t, but I found out the hard way that I was wrong. You can tell yourself you were only doing all this to help my father, but you had to know how much I’d hate it. You had to know it would hurt. Why didn’t you think to ask me?”

  “I made a mistake. We all make mistakes. You could have asked me about what happened with Rhona, for instance. Listened when I tried to tell you. You were supposed to trust me.”

  “I was going to marry you—

  “Were you?” He took a step closer. “Really? Until death us do part and for all the right reasons? Cait, if you trusted me enough to spend the rest of your life with me, you would have heard me out when I told you there was nothing between me and Rhona. Nothing happened. You would have believed me. Believed in me.”

  “Which you was I meant to believe in, Brice? The sober one or the one you are after you’ve been drinking? You never denied you’d been drinking with her that afternoon. The day after I buried my mother.”

  “All right, yes. That was stupid. I meant to have a glass with her and one turned into more. But you know me. You knew that about me. I’ve never pretended to be anyone but who I am.”

  “And maybe I finally realized that being who you were, it was only a matter of time before I lost you,” Cait said, the words catching in her throat so that they came out sounding thin and cold. “I couldn’t afford to lose anyone else.”

  Sudden tears made her eyes sting.

  She hadn’t meant to say that, didn’t even know that was how she’d felt. But that was the way of truth, it could sneak up sometimes the way wildcats could slink out of the darkness, as if they’d appeared from nothing. Cait hadn’t left the glen because she’d been angry at Brice, she realized. She’d left because it hurt too much to lose the people that she loved.

  Seeing Rhona wearing Brice’s shirt that afternoon, seeing the bottle and glasses on the kitchen table, the rumpled sheets, had made her realize she couldn’t count on him. Made her see that she’d taken him for granted, and that she could still lose him to drinking or another woman.

  Her father had always told her she couldn’t count on Brice, that Brice wasn’t the sort of man anyone could count on.

  Clearly, that much hadn’t changed. And Brice wasn’t defending himself. He stood looking at her, his face shuttered and his Adam’s apple rising and falling as if he was swallowing words he didn’t want to say. The paint-splattered black T-shirt he wore fit tight over his chest and arms, and she’d been wrong before when she’d thought that he looked leaner. Only his face had sharpened. The rest of him was more muscled than it had been. Harder, as though he’d been punishing himself with the weights. The lamplight played over sharp cheekbones and darkened his eyes, deepened the creases between his nose and mouth. Cait wanted to trace her fingers over every inch of that face, relearn the lines of it, but that was dangerous. He was dangerous—and exciting. And untrustworthy. Unstable.

  Sobered by the reminder, she wrapped her arms around her waist, holding herself in. Steeling herself. “Please, find the books and get them back for me. Get me some shelves. That’s all I want. I don’t need this to be one of your I’ll-get-to-it-next-week projects that stretch out six months. I’d like to get the place back up and running as quickly as possible and show Dad that I can manage.”

  “I’ll do what I can. I promise. And I am sorry. Truly.” He offered her a weak echo of one of his old rakish grins, but she saw that she’d hurt him again—and again she hadn’t meant to. Her tongue seemed to be running away with her tonight.

  That was another reason she needed to get away from him. Far away. Even as she turned back toward the door, though, she found herself asking another question. “Does everyone here blame me for not coming back when Dad broke his leg?”

  “You shouldn’t care what they think.”

  “Of course I care. We’re not twelve anymore, or sixteen, or even twenty. The glen’s too small to live here with people talking about us behind our backs. It’s a community, and we have to be part of it. Both of us. That’s the thing you never understood when I came back from university. Maybe it takes leaving this place to see that for all the way everyone meddles and interferes, the way they all know everything someone’s done before they’ve even done it, that’s better than living where no one cares at all.”

  Brice’s eyes fastened on hers, searching for answers Cait didn’t have herself. “Are you thinking of staying for good, then?”

  The way he looked at her, as if he saw her, as if he liked her no matter how ugly she felt inside, had always been her downfall.

  “I’ll stay at least as long as my father needs me,” she said. “Which means you and I will need to find a way to get along. Can you do that?”

  “You’re the last person in the world I’d ever want to hurt, mo ghràdh. I’ll do whatever I can to make things right.”

  Darkness

  “Hope begins in the dark,

  the stubborn hope

  that if you just show up

  and try to do the right thing,

  the dawn will come.”

  Anne Lamott

  Cait had forgotten how many stars shone above the Highlands, so bright that when she lay sleepless in her bed, she could almost hear them whispering an invitation through the window. She had missed them, and she had missed the brilliant moon that gilded the surface of the lochs and sparkled like diamonds on the crisp, cold snow. She’d always felt sorry for people who spent so much time yearning for what they wanted that they didn’t take time to appreciate what they had. Was she any better, though? She’d been so focused on what she’d lost that she hadn’t looked around to discover how much she had left.

  Used to waki
ng up early in London, this far north the stars were still out when she rose and dressed in jeans and three layers of soft wool sweaters. Carrying her shoes and jacket and trailed by a grumpy Mrs. Bogan, she padded along the corridor in thick hiking socks and stopped by the closed door of her father’s room. No sound came from within, so she eased the door gently open.

  In the moonlight pouring through the window, she had no trouble seeing. It was harder to believe her eyes. Where the old sleigh bed that her mum and dad had restored together should have been, there was only empty flooring—the whole room was empty, save for her father asleep on a pile of blankets in the corner. Even the clothing of her father’s that had once been stored in the heavy Jacobean dresser now lay in neat stacks on the floor, and not a stick of furniture remained.

  Her father had missed his calling. He should have been an actor. Cait’s heart squeezed when she thought about the telephone conversations in which he told her about the tourists who’d come into the Tea Room and given her the latest news from the glen as though nothing in the world was wrong.

  He literally had gotten rid of everything that had any connection to Cait’s mum, as if he couldn’t bear to face a single memory. The house, the Tea Room, everything he’d done was like a sharp steel blade tearing through Cait’s heart.

  Muscles locking in place on another thought, she inhaled sharply, then pulled the door closed and ran on tiptoes to the room that had been her brother’s. Her mother had kept all of Robbie’s things in place, and Cait had found her in here sometimes, sitting on his bed. Cait would sit beside her and take her hand, neither of them saying a word until, fifteen minutes or a half-hour later, Cait’s mother would finally stand up and smile a little tremulously. Then they would leave, and Cait’s mother would shut the door, and neither of them would bring it up.

  Afraid she’d find Robbie’s room empty, too, Cait hesitated with her hand on the door’s glass-knobbed handle. Then she steeled herself and went inside.

  The fact that all of Robbie’s things were still there was almost as shocking as her father’s empty room had been. But the air inside was thick and musty, and when she sank onto the edge of the bed where her mother used to sit, the motion sent up a cloud of dust that clogged her throat. Apparently, her father hadn’t cleaned the room since Cait had left, and Cait hadn’t had time to do more than a cursory clean a good while before that while her mum was ill.

  She wanted both to thump her father and to hold him tight. But he wasn’t the sort who would accept either of those things.

  Where had he been sleeping? In her room, maybe? Or more likely, downstairs on the sofa. It must have been hard for him to even climb the stairs with a broken ankle—hard for him to take care of himself at all.

  Her legs felt numb as she got up. She walked over to the photo that Robbie had pinned up on the wall when he’d come home on leave. It showed Robbie and his mates playing football at the base in Afghanistan, and whoever had snapped the pic had caught Robbie kicking the ball into the goal, the ball sailing forward clearly heading between the posts at an angle the goalie couldn’t reach. The joy of scoring was already breaking over Robbie’s face and the faces of his team.

  Cait touched the image lightly and then let herself out of the room with her eyes swimming.

  Downstairs, she searched the old back sitting room that her father used as a workroom looking for something that would give her the name of the doctor her father had seen about his cancer. If he couldn’t bear to see a stick of furniture that carried memories of her mother, he wasn’t likely to let Mum’s doctor treat him either.

  The narrow desk beside the settee was a mess. Her father had thrown stacks of unopened mail on it so often that sealed envelopes and catalogs had fallen to the floor beside it. Cait sifted through them, wondering if she dared open the phone and electric bills to see whether he’d been bothering to pay. But there were more pressing matters that the two of them would need to argue over.

  It was scarcely half past seven, too early yet to phone anyone, when she finally unearthed a paper from a cancer support center that had the name of a referring physician. And after that it was easy to find the contact information.

  She retreated toward the kitchen where Mrs. Bogan was sitting in the doorway, her tail wrapped around her forelegs with the tip twitching. Cait scooped her up and cuddled her, receiving more comfort than she was giving.

  “Yes, I know. You’re starving,” she said, burying her face in Mrs. Bogan’s fur.

  Mrs. Bogan began to purr, a low, deep rumble, and while Cait closed her eyes and concentrated on the sound, Mrs. Bogan wiggled closer, laying her head in the curve of Cait’s shoulder and letting it rest there while her whiskers tickled the skin beneath Cait’s chin.

  That was the thing about cats. As crotchety and demanding as they might be, they were always there when you needed them. And at the moment, Cait felt like she had no one else at all.

  “It’s human beings who are the problem,” she said, walking into the kitchen still carrying Mrs. Bogan. “Men. They should be required to come with instruction manuals. Not for us, for themselves. Only they wouldn’t bother to read them, and women would still be left trying to find the extra screws and leftover pieces and cleaning up the messes they leave behind.”

  She fed Mrs. Bogan, then set about the task of making breakfast for her father. God only knew how long it had been since he had eaten a proper meal. For all that the refrigerator looked sparse, though, there was a reasonable supply of staples, and she found eggs and butter and milk, along with a package of sausage that looked as though it should still be all right. Her mulish streak urged Cait to make her mother’s pancakes, to force her father to remember something. She settled for making Aberdeen butteries instead, though she wished she had the recipe book to work from. Maybe even more than the individual library books, that was the biggest loss. Generations of Stewart women had added their best recipes to that book, or appended notes to recipes from older generations about what dish went with another, who in the family particularly loved something, or how another version was worse or better. Sometimes, while her mum was baking, Cait would sit at the table, her legs wrapped around the chair legs reading the notes and imagining the women who had written them.

  At eight o’clock on the dot, she phoned the doctor’s office, and after a bit of runaround, managed to sweet-talk the receptionist into getting Dr. Webster on the phone. Fully expecting that he would say he couldn’t speak to her about her father’s condition, she was surprised when there was almost no delay before a brisk, deep voice came on the line.

  “I’m told you’re on the chart as Donald Fletcher’s emergency contact,” he said. “I’m relieved to hear from you, to tell you the truth.”

  “Aye, sir. I’ve only just found out about the cancer. I don’t know much about his treatment.”

  “I wish he’d let us provide some. We’re only focusing on pain management at the moment.”

  “Which is why I’m calling. I wanted to ask you how much the chemo or radiation would help. I’m sure it’s impossible to predict, but before I try and argue with him, it would help to know if we’re talking a matter of additional years or only months.”

  “The surgery’s what would buy him time.

  “Surgery?” Cait sat down at the kitchen table and stared out the window where the sky was turning lavender and orange as the sun began to rise. “To cut the cancer out of the bone? I didn’t realize that was a possibility.”

  The doctor hesitated. “I’m afraid we’re beyond the stage where limb-salvage would be an option, but as I explained to him, a lower limb prosthetic could still provide him full mobility. The longer we wait, the harder and more extensive additional treatment will become, and the more chance there is that the cancer will metastasize.”

  Cait pressed her free hand against her chest where a combination of elation and anger was making her heart beat faster. “You’re saying the condition isn’t hopeless if you amputate?”

  “
I made that clear to him.” The other end of the line was silent a moment before the doctor answered. “There are no guarantees, of course, but overall, the five-year survival rate for bone cancer is seventy percent. Your father could have a reasonable expectation for recovery. I’d like to have him in better nutritional condition for the surgery, but frankly it’s his attitude that’s the problem.”

  “Meaning his stubbornness is literally going to kill him.”

  The doctor gave a startled chuckle. “I wish I could say he was the first patient who’d refused treatment that could save his life. It’s easy to calculate survival statistics. Measuring the quality of the time a person has left is harder. But your father’s already in substantial pain. The surgery could make that better. If you can convince him to come back in to see me, I would really like to help him.”

  Cait wasn’t sure what to think as she thanked the doctor and rang off. Knowing her father, she could see how much he’d hate having to learn to walk all over again with a prosthetic. And she knew better than most that once her father made up his mind about anything he wasn’t likely to change it. When was the last time he’d so much as tried to see the other side of an argument?

  With a sigh, she rose and went to brew a pot of tea. While the biscuits finished baking, she fried a couple of eggs over hard, the way her father liked them, and she was setting marmalade on the table when she heard his cane thumping down the stairs. She closed her eyes, trying to drum up a bit of calm before she had to face him.

  He came in limping heavily, his skin gray with fatigue instead of pink with sun and wind. “No need to make a fuss over breakfast,” he said. “You sound like a herd of bulls clomping around in here.”

  “Maybe that’s because your doctor just told me you need to get your strength back.”

  “You talked to him?”

  “Yes, I did. So sit and eat what I put in front of you.” Cait pulled out the chair and pointed at it sternly. “Or I’ll give you a clomping the likes of which you’ve never seen before. That I promise you.”