4. Now
4
NOW
For the second time in two weeks, Brooke found herself at the University of Edinburgh. She trailed her fingers over the rough-hewn stone wall of the bustling hallway, keeping her eyes out for anyone she might need to avoid—although nothing could be worse than running into the dean.
Typically, she met Mhairi in the yellow-painted coffee shop on Buccleuch Street, but Charlotte had requested an editorial meeting and Mhairi had suggested her office. Brooke wasn’t expecting a revision letter so soon after sending in the first draft of Mhairi’s memoir, and the unknown nature of this meeting sent coiling tendrils of anxiety through her stomach.
She found the office she wanted, the brass plaque on the wall inscribed with Professor Mhairi McCallister, Author in Residence. The thrill she’d felt seeing the inscription the first time she’d been on campus still sparked through her, but now it was mixed with a gratefulness for knowing Mhairi, not just knowing of her. Brooke knocked on the open door. “Good morning.”
Mhairi looked up with her kind eyes and welcoming smile that made her the students’ favorite. Her easy demeanor and gift for developing writing talent had everyone vying for spots in her workshops and fellowships. Her curly brown hair going gray at the temples was tied back in a red-and-purple bandeau and the sleeves of her silky shirt spread out like butterfly wings when she opened her arms to hug Brooke.
“Hello,” Mhairi said, patting Brooke softly on the back.
Brooke gave her an extra squeeze and noticed Mhairi felt smaller than usual. “Have you been skipping lunch again?”
Mhairi waved the concern away. “Of course not.”
“You sure?” Brooke perched on the arm of the leather guest chair and scanned the room, careful to flit right over the framed picture of Mhairi’s family where Jack hooked his arms around his brothers, the sunlight glinting off his glasses. Those old barbs from memories of every other insignificant person had dulled with time, but Jack’s still drew blood. Avoiding that picture—that beaming smile she used to bask in when she could draw it out of him—was half the reason she always asked Mhairi to meet off campus and never here.
Although, maybe she should have insisted—the office was in shambles: bookshelves were emptied, the books in stacks on the floor; boxes stuffed with papers littering the desk, tables, and the other chair. Brooke hadn’t been here in years and while she remembered it being lived-in, she also remembered it being livable . This looked like an episode of Hoarders .
“What happened in here?” This seemed far more comprehensive than her impression of a professor’s version of spring cleaning at the end of a term.
“Getting things in order…” Mhairi trailed off as she likewise observed the disaster of a room.
“Like all the things? At once?”
“I opened one filing cabinet and next thing I know…” Mhairi made an exploding gesture with her hands before digging through a box and pulling out a Sharpie and Suzi’s book. “I have a favor to ask.” She clutched them to her chest. “I’m a huge fan. Would you sign my book? Is that weird? You know what, never mind.” Mhairi waved her hand in front of her face. “It’s weird,” she said with a teasing smirk.
Brooke laughed and took the Sharpie and book. “Never gonna let me live that down, huh?”
Brooke had said the exact same words to Mhairi on her first day in class seven years ago, fan-girling on the quad. Brooke uncapped the marker with a flourish, feigning exasperation, but she never minded the ribbing. Especially not today. Knowing Mhairi had bought the book for this exact purpose soothed the itchy-in-her-own-skin feeling Brooke had had all week.
Technically, telling Mhairi about her books was in breach of Brooke’s confidentiality agreements, but moms never counted when spilling secrets in high school and she figured that logic applied to beloved mentors, too.
The Sharpie fumes filled the air and Brooke finished off her signature with an XOXO, her heart pinching with yearning for her signature to match the name on the title page one day. She handed the book back and Mhairi smiled her warm, eye-crinkling smile.
“For the Brooke Shelf,” Mhairi said as she stood the book on the top shelf with the others Brooke had ghostwritten and paused to admire them. “It is truly an honor to hold your words, my dear.”
Brooke’s eyes welled up and she blinked rapidly. “Thank you.” One day soon, Mhairi would hold their cowritten words in her hands and the thought was nearly too much for Brooke’s heart to bear.
Charlotte knocked on the door and Brooke pulled in a breath to compose herself.
“Sorry I’m late.” She moved a box from the second guest chair onto the floor as if this level of chaos was perfectly normal and said her hellos.
“How is campus life?” Charlotte asked Mhairi, fishing, as always, for humorous stories.
“Quiet now the students are gone for the summer, but I did have one roll an entire suitcase full of notebooks, extra pencils, a hoodie, and snacks into my one-hour final as if they were going to camp out for weeks in the lecture hall.”
Charlotte laughed as she pulled out her overflowing legal pad of notes and Brooke’s smile dimmed. She’d been counting on more time to watch TV and sit on park benches or whatever she was supposed to do to refill the well before jumping into a revision.
As Mhairi and Charlotte chitchatted, Brooke couldn’t tear her eyes away from the yellow paper, trying to see how substantial the feedback might be. She struggled to keep the pressure in her chest under control, her fingers bouncing against her knee.
When Charlotte finally settled in, Mhairi pulled out a notebook and Brooke grabbed her laptop from her bag.
“I am almost always against a prologue, but in this case, I think it might be nice to show a little slice of Mhairi’s childhood on Skye as a full chapter instead of the flashbacks we’re getting early in the story, to show how Mhairi’s love of the land and connection to the island started.”
“I like that,” Mhairi said.
Brooke typed out the note, her mind thinking through the flashback pieces she’d woven in as backstory and which would make the most compelling opening. “Maybe the story of when you got lost when you were eight? We can dig into the theme right away then of how much we trust nature to be unforgiving or nurturing and that bond you felt early on.”
Mhairi spread her hands out. “Yes, I love that.”
“I do, too,” Charlotte said, her head tipping down to her notebook again, and she pushed her wavy hair off her forehead.
They went through page after page of Charlotte’s notes about speeding up the pace in some places, slowing it down in others, adding more of the firsthand accounts from Mhairi’s friends and colleagues who helped design and build the trail.
“I apologize, but this last note is not concrete.” Charlotte tapped the tips of her fingers together in a guilty manner and Brooke’s shoulders tightened.
“You’re making me nervous.”
“Oh, don’t be. It’s nothing we can’t fix together.” Charlotte waved her off, but the jingling of her bracelets sounded like a death knell. “The story is all here. It’s structurally sound, but it doesn’t feel…alive.”
What did that make it? Dead? Brooke wasn’t sure she could feel her feet.
Charlotte reached a hand out to the arm of Brooke’s chair. “I know this is the worst kind of feedback, and you know how much I love your writing. We’ll get there.” Her encouragement felt like popped bubble wrap around those other, very sharp words that’d cut deep lacerations in Brooke’s lungs. She couldn’t even bring herself to look in Mhairi’s direction.
She could handle feedback. Craved these two-hour sessions with Charlotte, decoding her sloppy legal pad of action items. But she’d never given Brooke something so amorphous that sounded an awful lot like, You missed the mark .
Brooke had spent weeks researching, listening to Mhairi’s stories, looking through old documents, pictures, and journal entries. She’d been haunting the archives from open to close, waking in the night from fragmented dreams of Skye, broken storylines, and epiphanies. She’d thought this draft was some of her finest work. Something grand that her name would finally be attached to. But the soft look on Mhairi’s face made all the blood rush from Brooke’s head.
This was Mhairi’s book, but Brooke had been doing the bulk of the writing, like most of her jobs. Brooke had taken Mhairi’s preoccupation with her classes and students as a vote of confidence in her abilities, but clearly she couldn’t be trusted left to her own devices. That relentless fear and self-doubt had crept into this work and she hadn’t even noticed.
This is all my fault.
“Can you be a little more specific?” Brooke asked, her voice coming out squeaky.
“It’s missing the details that make a memoir, well…memorable,” Charlotte said gently. “I want to feel the wind on my face and taste the salt in the air and smell the boggy soil. I want to go on a journey.”
“Okay, so the setting isn’t coming through?” Brooke had spent countless hours watching videos of the Skye Trail to capture the details of Mhairi’s story. But maybe seeing it wasn’t the same as experiencing it.
Charlotte curled her lips inward before saying, “I don’t think you’ve tapped into the heartbeat of this story quite yet.”
A wave of hot shame pulsed through Brooke. She was sitting in front of a different mahogany desk, but it felt exactly like that day in the dean’s office, watching everything she’d worked for snatched away. She could see it so clearly: Mhairi’s disappointment that Brooke never lived up to her potential. A life of ghostwriting and sitting in the audience. Never holding a book with her name on the cover.
Charlotte stood and squeezed Brooke’s shoulder. “Why don’t you two take a couple of days to digest this. I hate to turn up the pressure, but I need the next draft back in four weeks to keep our publication timeline.”
Brooke probably said goodbye when Charlotte left, but she couldn’t be sure. She was too busy scanning her memory for any writer’s craft book that would help her “find a heartbeat” in one month.
This memoir was supposed to be Brooke’s second chance, the long-lost fellowship she’d never had, the key to launching her career. And she was blowing it.
Mhairi moved a towering stack of books from her desk to the floor one by one. “I’m so sorry, Brooke. I clearly haven’t communicated the stories well enough.”
Sometimes clients had a picture in their mind of how their story would unfold and they hadn’t quite translated that to Brooke. But this was different.
“No. Oh my gosh, no. This is on me.”
Mhairi had the decency not to agree with her. She steepled her fingers under her chin. “I know you researched this. There’s just something otherworldly about Skye. I think you need to experience it to really be able to write about it.”
Brooke leaned forward on a rush of relief that Mhairi wasn’t taking this project away from her. She knew Mhairi was swamped, but she’d take it as a sign that Mhairi hadn’t lost all faith in her. “I totally agree. I need to see it.”
She could take a train up to Inverness—that was about four hours—then another four-hour bus ride to Portree, the capital of the island. Stay in an Airbnb. Do a couple of little day hikes to really get a feel for the scenery.
“I trust Charlotte implicitly. It’s key that we capture the essence of how transformative it is to be out there, connected to the Earth and the ghosts of the past and the hope for the future. I know it’s a lot to ask. And I wouldn’t, but this is my memoir. It’s my story .”
Brooke knew how important this project was, how personal. But of all clients—of all people —she’d do whatever she needed to give Mhairi the story that was worthy of her.
Brooke wouldn’t jeopardize her second chance.
Sitting in Portree, fighting off gulls as she ate fish and chips on the harbor, and taking notes on the feel of the sea breeze wasn’t going to be enough.
“I need to hike the trail.”
Anxiety snaked through Brooke as she said the words. She’d never done a hike like that. Overnight backpacking trips, sure. But the trail was eighty miles of brutal terrain—boggy, dangerous, and more or less for professional hikers only.
“Are you sure?” Mhairi asked.
Brooke nodded even though the queasiness in her stomach begged her to reconsider. “I want to get this right.”
Mhairi’s face absolutely glowed. She clasped her hands together. “Brooke, I would love for you to experience the trail. I worry about you sometimes. Your career has really taken off, but I wonder if you’re feeding your soul.”
Brooke had no concerns about the state of her soul—she got to do her dream for a living, but it would be worth it to do something important for Mhairi, to have a tangible connection to this trail she was so proud of—of course Brooke would go.
She mentally calculated the deadline on the book. The trail would take her over a week to complete. Transcribing notes when she got back would take two days. Heavy rewrites she’d have to do in two weeks to have time for a final read-through. In order to make it all happen and get the next draft to Charlotte in time, Brooke needed to leave for Skye this weekend.
It would be impossible for Chels to take off work on such short notice to go with her. And Kieran would die sleeping on an air pillow, not to mention the ground. But hiking by herself was out of the question. Just the idea of being alone with her own thoughts for seven days was enough to send her into a panic spiral.
“Would you want to come with me?” She and Mhairi climbed Arthur’s Seat, the hill in the middle of Edinburgh, on days they needed to brainstorm. It would be a dream trip, actually. Spending time with Mhairi out in the wilderness, getting all of her stories in real time…
“I’m afraid the fellowship schedule won’t allow it.”
Brooke winced. The reminder of the fellowship still stung even after all this time. “Right, of course. When did you say the photographer was heading out?”
The publisher had hired someone to photograph the cover as well as images to match the important places in the narrative.
“Next week, I believe. In fact, he’s supposed to be—”
“I could go with him.” Hiking could be as social or solitary as they wanted. “Just so there’s someone to, you know, make sure I don’t die,” Brooke said with as much humor as she could muster.
Mhairi’s eyes darted across the room, then down to her shoes. “Brooke, I failed to mention…the photographer broke his leg and we’ve replaced him with my nephew.” The careful way Mhairi said it made Brooke’s stomach clench before she said, “Jack, that is.”
The air rushed out of Brooke’s lungs and spots littered her vision. She grabbed the armrests on her chair, thankful she’d been sitting or she’d surely be a puddle on the floor right now. She squeezed the cool leather.
Hiking with Jack Sutherland was absolutely out of the question.
She could do it alone. It was fine. This was fine.
“Ah.”
“And that’s all…history?” Mhairi asked gently, her eyes soft but still probing.
A wave of heat crashed over Brooke. Remnants of humiliation. Mhairi didn’t need to know how much Brooke still thought about Jack. The what-ifs plagued her. Not What if things had worked out between us? but What if Jack hadn’t totally screwed me over?
Brooke wanted Jack to stay exactly where she’d left him—in her past. “Ancient,” she assured Mhairi.
“Wonderful. Because I’m expecting him any—”
A knock sounded and at the stricken look on Mhairi’s face, Brooke turned to the man standing in the threshold.
Slate-gray slacks, white button-up shirt, his hand falling from the door, one knuckle still raised. Dark brown hair messy on top, tortoiseshell glasses, eyelashes for days.
“—minute.”
Brooke’s pulse scattered like leaves on a gusting Scottish wind.
Apparently this week could get worse.