Chapter 1
Chapter
One
There’s a naked man watching me.
At first, I didn’t know what the hell I was looking at. The way the light slants as it passes over Beinn Bhàn—at least I think that’s the name of the mountain to my left; they all sound the same so far—has been playing tricks on my eyes since the evening I first got here just four days ago.
I thought maybe it was a piece of driftwood beached on the shore at an awkward angle, but then it moved ever so slightly. What I thought was the end was indeed someone’s head, and what I thought was a sturdy branch was, well…I’m staring at a penis.
Now that I see it, there’s no mistaking what it is.
My first thought is that this man is incredibly well-endowed if I can see his dick from across the loch, even if this particular bay is 200 meters at its widest. My second thought is, uh, what the fuck?
Is he skinny dipping, or what’s going on here?
I expect the naked man to enter the water but he doesn’t.
Instead, he eventually stops staring at me—as if I’m the problem for interrupting his naked time—and turns walking around a rocky outcrop until he disappears.
The last thing I see is his white ass, which, even though he’s too far away to make out any details, I can tell he does squats.
Maybe he lives in the castle, I think to myself.
There’s what looks to be a crumbling castle of sorts across the water, I can see just the tip of it from behind the small hill and tops of the stunted pine.
I can see even more if I walk to where the bay opens up to Loch Torridon.
It looks like something out of a Gothic romance novel.
Then again, so does my entire situation.
I sit down on the back step with my coffee, which has gone lukewarm in the time it took me to identify a stranger’s penis from across a body of water this is what my life is now, and I stare at the place where he was.
The shore is empty, just dark gentle waves lapping against the pebble and stone. It was like he was never there.
I tell myself I imagined him. Wouldn’t be the first time my overactive imagination reared its crazy head.
But I didn’t imagine him, because I already drew him.
The sketchbook is open in my lap. I started this morning trying to get the line of the heather blooming right on the slope across the loch.
I’m a freelance botanical illustrator I know, I know, I’m just rolling in the dough, which is partly why a year in a stone cottage on the west coast of Scotland—with the chance of it becoming mine—sounded less like a sentence, and more like a rope thrown to a drowning woman.
Somewhere between the heather and the third cup of coffee, I’d put my pencil down and looked up, and there he was in all his horse-cock glory.
I look at the page now. Okay, so I have not drawn the man. I’m not that quick. But I’ve drawn the area of where he was, the rocks and the line of the shore and a long pale absence in the middle of it where my eye kept going.
I close the sketchbook.
I’m thirty years old, and four days into the rest of my life.
And the welcome wagon, apparently, is a man with no clothes on.
The cottage is small and stone, and sits about thirty meters back from the high-tide line.
My great-aunt Effie lived here for sixty years and, before her, so did three Galloway women I know almost nothing about.
I know almost nothing about Effie either.
I met her exactly once, when I was twelve, on one of the trips my dad made to the coast of his childhood and brought me along on.
My mother never came on those trips, something about how Scotland was too cold (we lived in Colorado, so I have no idea why that was her specific excuse, but she is a woman full of excuses, to be sure).
Anyway, I remember a small woman with thick grey hair and watchful eyes and an herb garden that smelled like something magical.
I remember her looking at me for a long time at the kitchen table and asking me questions that didn’t sound like questions a great-aunt should be asking a twelve-year-old.
I remember liking her a lot. There weren’t that many people I liked—especially when they fell into the “old people” and “family” categories that younger me felt drawn to—but I had liked Aunt Effie.
And then I didn’t see her again. My dad died when I was eighteen, and the trips stopped; Effie sent a card the year I got married and, strangely enough, last year when I got divorced, but that was as much contact we’d had (to be clear, it wasn’t a “Congrats on your divorce” card, it was more of a vague postcard from Scotland that said she was thinking of me and hoped I was well).
When the email came from her solicitor, I had to think about it for a moment.
Effie Galloway. The cottage was to be left to me and me alone, but only if certain conditions were met.
The conditions were thus: I had to live there for one year. Continuously, with brief allowances for travel, properly notified to the executor. At the end of the year the property would be mine along with what little estate she left.
It took me forty-eight hours to say yes.
I had many different reasons for agreeing to it.
The version I told my brother Andrew is that I needed somewhere to land after the divorce, which was true, albeit simple-sounding.
The version I told his wife—and my best friend Maddie— at her kitchen table at two in the morning the night before I flew out, was the longer one.
I have been sleeping in other people’s houses for a year.
I have not had a place that was mine since I moved out of the house I shared with Ryan.
My freelance work is shrinking faster than I can keep up with thank you, shitty AI art.
My body hurts most days and the cold months are coming—Chicago cold is different from Scotland cold, as far as I’ve heard—and Andrew and Maddie’s basement has done its job for as long as anyone could expect, and I needed to be somewhere where my exhaustion and failures weren’t taking up space in someone else’s life.
And, although I didn’t say this part out loud, even to Maddie, Effie chose me.
Out of every Galloway in her bloodline, that woman I met once when I was twelve put my name in her will.
I have no idea why. I don’t know what she saw in me, especially at such a young age, or what she remembered of me, or what had made her decide.
But she did, and the cottage is the only thing in my life right now that has been offered rather than survived, so I was not going to say no to it.
Though, to be honest, the fact that there are conditions in place—such as staying here for one year—is more than a little strange.
It reminds me of those old spooky shows where the tenant has to survive a night in a haunted house in order to inherit it.
Luckily, I’m a little strange and spooky myself, and even though I’ve only been here four days, as far as I can tell the cottage isn’t haunted.
It’s just a little drafty, and the things scratching at the windows at night are just the climbing roses moving in the ever-present breeze. I think.
So here I am. Four days into the rest of my life and looking at a stranger’s dick across a loch in Wester Ross.
My therapist would have something to say about all of this, but I don’t have to see her for at least a year, so…
The cottage is called Tigh-na-Mara, House by the Sea in Gaelic, which I have been pronouncing wrong every time I’ve tried to say it out loud.
It sits low on a rocky spit on the south shore of Loch Torridon, looking west across a small bay to a second spit where the castle crouches half-hidden behind its own outcrops.
The road in is a single-track branch off the A896 that branches off again onto this small peninsula, gives up halfway and turns to gravel, then to ruts.
The nearest village is Shieldaig, cute as a button, in one direction, and the other direction is Torridon Village.
In between is the castle-like Torridon Hotel which is maybe the closest bastion of civilization to me and that’s still a good fifteen minutes away by car.
Effie chose her remoteness on purpose. So did the three Galloway women before her.
I’m starting to suspect this is a Galloway thing.
Despite the remoteness, however, the cottage has everything a newly-divorced gal could need.
There’s a quaint kitchen with a wood-burning stove, open shelving piled high with wooden bowls and mismatching porcelain mugs and a deep stone sink.
Paintings of the sea and ships give it a nautical flair—every now and then there’s a portrait of flowers that gives me the itch to paint, and the worn oak table and two chairs is exactly the place to do that.
Then there is a sitting room with two cushy armchairs, a fireplace, and a window that faces the water with gauzy curtains that billow in dramatically.
A cold-as-hell-even-with-the-heat-blaring bathroom has both a soaking tub and a tiny shower with plumbing that shakes and shimmies when you use it.
A small guest bedroom upstairs under the eaves, low-beamed, where I have already hit my head twice, and a locked closet that I don’t have a key for.
The main bedroom is downstairs. A little sparse, with just the bed—a very comfortable queen, thank you, Effie!
—, a side table, and an ornately-carved wardrobe in the corner that looks like a man standing in the middle of the night, but it’s workable.
It just needs some art on the walls. I can tell there were a few paintings there at one point thanks to their outlines, but, for whatever reason, Effie removed them before she died.
Speaking of more strange things, there is an iron horseshoe nailed over the bedroom door, points up.
There is another over the front door, smaller, older, and one on the back door as well.