Chapter 9 Heath
Heath
I wake in Aviemore with blood on my teeth, tasting metal, sharp and real. The dream lingers so strongly I almost expect my jaw to hurt. But it’s only the train bouncing over the tracks, making my teeth grind. Outside, the Cairngorms slide into pale, icy light.
The train hisses to a stop, shaking off sleep.
I hoist my bag. Grab my suitcase. Step onto the platform.
Below, the town sits beneath white peaks, small and sheltered.
Angus waits—pea coat buttoned, flat cap low, our grandfather's face in his, weathered by highland winters I’ve only visited.
His smile shows teeth but not warmth. Then his arms crush the air from my lungs. The metal taste returns.
“You look like shit,” he says, voice thick but steady.
“Couldn’t sleep,” I say. I gesture at the mountains. “Figured I’d get a jump on the altitude acclimation.”
He laughs, tired and low. “You don’t get used to these mountains. You give in.” He claps my shoulder and leads me through the slush, our boots squishing. Families herd their kids nearby, and the air smells of gasoline, peat smoke, and cinnamon buns from the Greggs by the station.
A few minutes later, we’re in Angus’s old Land Rover, driving away from Aviemore.
The cabin smells like burnt coffee and wet dog, though he’s never had a dog as far as I know.
He always said he preferred machines to living things.
Machines made sense and didn’t need affection.
I wedge my duffel behind my knees and let him drive us out of town.
His gloved hands rest loosely on the wheel.
He talks without stopping—about the weather, local gossip, barley prices, and a barmaid who won big and left town. Angus keeps the important things to himself, like good whiskey.
As we climb above Loch Garten, he asks, “You hungry?” His way of inviting talk.
“No.”
He nods. Doesn't push, never has. Above us, bare mountains stand under wind-beaten heather. Angus's house, once a deer stalker's bothy, sits at the edge of Rothiemurchus Forest, half-covered by pines heavy with wet snow.
Angus parks, kills the engine, heater whirring. His face is paler in the dashboard light. “How about a drink?”
“Hell, yes,” I say. My mouth is still brassy from the dream.
Inside Angus’s house, I light his big fireplace. He gets two glasses. Pours something golden. We don't toast. We sip. For a minute, the silence sits with us—weighty but not unfriendly.
“So. You’ve come halfway around the world to see a chunk of land.”
I try for a smile. “Not just to see it. Maybe to unload it.”
He snorts. “Always the sentimental one.”
His words hurt more than I thought they would. “Maybe. Or maybe I’m just practical.” I take another sip and feel it burn my tongue and throat. “You said you wanted to buy me out.”
He sets his glass down, knuckles whitening. “If you’ll let me.”
“Why?” I ask. “You never cared about the property before. Granddad’s ashes, maybe, but not the goddamn rocks and bogs.”
He shrugs, oddly childlike. “America never suited me. No place has, but here at least people leave you alone.”
I swirl the whisky. “Is that it? You want to disappear?” I can hear a bit of envy in my own voice.
He meets my eyes. “Not disappear. Just stop drifting. Here, I know who I am. The land remembers me.”
He’s being honest, and I hate that about him.
“You ever feel like that?” he asks. “Like you fit, somewhere?”
"No. Maybe sometimes at Harvard, or when the app hit seven million users. But no." I think of the Silicon Valley office, constant searching. "Nothing lasts."
Angus nods. “Then sell it to me. You’re not coming back. Leave the ghosts to ghosts. It’s a joke, really. Still, my hand tightens on the glass, and I have to set it down before I break it. glass.
“You’re right,” I say. “I’ll start the paperwork at home.”
“Good,” he says. He gives a rare smile, meant more for the land than for me. I almost feel sorry that he needs it so badly.
We sit in silence for a while, watching frost spread across the window and darkness fill the yard. Angus refills our glasses, and I start to think the night will end with us drunk and trading gentle insults, like we have before.
But then, in one of his rare turns, he says: “Were you really in Galloway?”
The question is so abrupt I nearly choke.
“Yes.” My throat remembers every second. The mud, the trees, the endless empty moor. “Why?”
He leans forward, elbows on knees, blue veins etched at his wrists. “Mom said something about it. What were you doing there?”
I stare at the whisky. “I don’t know.” Then: “Following someone, I guess.”
He arches an eyebrow, incredulous. “A woman?”
“Sort of.”
He laughs. “You never change.”
But it isn’t a joke, and I don’t laugh. Angus pours more whiskey, and the room feels heavy with drink and expectation. I don’t want to say more, but the alcohol makes me talk anyway.e alcohol.
“I saw her at Bemelman’s in the city. But it felt…
I don’t know how to say it.” The words are dry and foreign in my mouth.
“Like I’d seen her before. Not her, exactly, but the shape of her—her laugh, maybe.
Then, when I arrived in London, I saw her being interviewed on a BBC travel show.
She mentioned she was traveling to Scotland, too.
”He watches me, and it feels strange. I hate being looked at like this.
Angus leans forward. "So you tracked her to Scotland."
"Yes," I admit, the whiskey loosening my tongue.
"I wanted to know more about her. I can't explain it, but something about her felt.
.. familiar. Like a song I'd heard before but couldn't name.
" I stare into my glass. "I followed her to Glasgow first. Just..
. watching from a distance. Then, when she left for Galloway, I followed her there, too.
" I look up, half-expecting judgment in his eyes.
"Every time she looks at me, I swear to God, Angus—it’s like being struck by lightning. "
Angus whistles low. "You've got it bad, brother."
I tense up. “No. Well, maybe.” The truth is, I don’t know what this is. Every time I talk to Maya, it feels like the ground drops out from under me, like I’ve missed a step on the stairs.
Angus grins wolfishly. “So what did you do, Romeo?”
I clench my jaw. “Nothing. She took a train to Inverness, and I came here. Maybe I’ll never see her again.”
He cocks his head, entirely unconvinced. “Liar.”
I set my glass down. “Angus,” I say, “do you believe—” I stop. I almost said, Do you believe some people are fated to meet?
I stop. I almost ask if he believes in fate. Instead: “Do you believe in déjà vu?”
He shrugs, staring at the fire. “Maybe. When I first moved to Seattle, I couldn’t shake the feeling I’d been there before. Every corner, every pub. It rattled around in my head for months. I figured it was just old dreams. Or maybe static in the brain. Why?”
"Because I keep having dreams. About her.
About us. Dreams that feel like they keep going after I wake.
" I take a deep breath, air heavy with woodsmoke.
"Last night, I was on a beach. The wind was so cold my teeth hurt.
Maya was there, but I couldn't see her face. I heard her voice, but couldn’t find her.
I kept looking, but she was always out of reach. "
He frowns. “Sounds more like a nightmare.”
“Maybe. But when I woke up, I could smell the ocean and her perfume. When I stood, my legs ached, and my throat was raw from screaming.” I look at him, hoping for some comfort or even just a word. “It felt real. Like I was really there.”
Angus watches me, unmoving as a boulder. Eventually, he asks: "You think she’s a ghost?"
“No,” I say, annoyed. “But it’s like we’re tied together. Like—I don’t know. Like we knew each other once, and we’re supposed to remember, but neither of us can. Maybe that’s what the dreams are.”
He whistles again, softer. “You sound mental.”
“Yeah.” I rake my hands through my hair. “I know.”
But he studies me a long time, longer than is comfortable. “You know, Nana always thought people in love had met before. In other lives, or other shapes. She said the feeling was a kind of memory.”
I nod, remembering. Grandmother’s dry hands, the way she pressed lavender between our palms, insisting that if we smelled it often enough, we’d never forget our home.
“Do you believe that?” I ask him.
Angus shrugs. “I believe in love, but I don’t know what it means. If you’re fixated on this girl, why are you here with me?”
I don’t have a good answer. Honestly, I don’t have a safe one either.
The truth is, I’m afraid of the dreams and what they might mean, and of what Maya Banks could be if I let myself find out.
I didn’t come to Aviemore just to sell land.
I came to avoid fate for a little longer, hoping that distance would help me see things more clearly.
Later, I go to bed in the small guest room, whisky still on my lips.
Angus’s words echo in my mind. I dream again: the beach is black, the wind comes from the North Sea.
I stand above a rocky cove, searching for someone.
Her name is on my tongue, but I can’t say it.
She’s somewhere in the dark, either weeping or laughing—I can’t tell.
I want to jump, to pull her to shore, but something deep and old keeps me in place. My feet are tied with heather and wire.
I wake up, my heart aching like a gull in a storm, cold sweat drying on my chest in the darkness of Angus’s spare room.
I know it was just a dream, but the smell of the ocean fills my nose—a mix of salt, seaweed, and something old and strange that clings to my skin as if I’d just come out of the North Sea.
Angus fries eggs and porridge and plays Johnny Cash on the old radio, as if both our nerves can’t process the silence any longer.
The snowfall outside is the fine, relentless sort that never seems to accumulate but erases all detail and color from the landscape, reducing the world to smudges of gray and white.
We eat in companionable silence, our spoons ringing faintly against the chipped bowls.
After breakfast, he drives me into Aviemore to meet the solicitor, Mrs. McPherson, a heavyset woman who smells of rosehip tea and laughs quietly.
The meeting is short and so friendly it feels like it was meant to happen, as if we’re just following a script.
Angus signs the papers, I sign, Mrs. McPherson stamps them, and just like that, a hundred acres of bog, pine, and stone are no longer mine.
We linger in the parking lot, not wanting to leave. Angus lights a cigarette, shielding it from the wind, and offers me one. I take it, more for the company than because I want to smoke.
"You should go after her," he says eventually, blue smoke spiraling from his nostrils. "Who knows, maybe she’s waiting for you."
I can’t laugh. Instead, I mutter, "What if she's not? What if..." An entire cosmos of questions blooms behind my teeth, but I swallow them. "I think she’d rather not be found."
He grins, a bit wild in the calm morning. "Doesn’t matter. You don’t seem like the type to let good trouble go unsolved."
I want to argue, but I don’t. The truth is, part of me is already heading north, following an invisible path through the country.
It’s not just her travel plans—I memorized them after hearing them once in that BBC interview, the words sticking with me like a map: Inverness first, then along the coast through the Black Isle, past Cromarty and Dornoch, all the way to the Orkney Islands.
"The further north I go, the clearer my dreams become," she’d said, not as a boast but as a private joke, maybe even a dare.
Is she laughing at me? Or is she leaving clues for someone lonely enough to follow?
I drop the cigarette before I finish it and crush it into the ice. "I’ve got a train to catch," I say. Angus nods, looking satisfied. We shake hands, quick and hard. He doesn’t say goodbye, and neither do I.