Chapter 3
Three
“What. A. Dick. You told him you were dying and that’s how he responds?” Tara squawked from my phone’s speaker. “I just CAN’T with this douchebag. Ugh, my rage levels are spiking so high right now!”
I immediately regretted telling my roommate about the whole Iain refusing to let me leave thing.
But she’d called to check in on me on her way to her boyfriend’s place in Liverpool, and the whole story had come out in a huge gush before I remembered why I usually kept stories of how bad things were at work to myself.
“Tara …” I said, as I popped a Sainsburys’ Chicken Tikka Masala ready meal into the microwave, sitting on top of the very little counter space in our tiny flat’s narrow kitchen.
“No, Milly. Don’t Tara me!” she commanded from my phone’s speaker. “Give me one reason—just one reason why I shouldn’t hunt him down and tear out his throat!”
“It’s okay, Tara. It’s fine …” I insisted—not because it was, but because Tara sounded violently upset, and I didn’t want her to do anything rash.
I didn’t have many girlfriends before Tara—those were surprisingly hard to make and keep when you’d spent large swaths of your prime bestie-making years in various medical centers battling leukemia.
By the time I’d finally made it to Scotland for a summer-long business and technology internship at the Royal Scottish Bank, my social skills were so underdeveloped I didn’t even begin to hope I’d make any friends there.
But my friendless days were over from the moment I met Canadian Tara Hamilton at the RSB orientation. Tara was a self-professed anti-Canadian.
Rude, bold, and strong—in both body and personality. Plus, she was ultra-fashionable. I swear, if they were casting Sex in the City: Edinburgh, she’d easily get the role of the Canadian glamour girl.
The only thing we had in common other than our internship was being biracial. But we even were at opposite ends of the spectrum on that. While I had a split-up Black mother and White Jewish father, Tara had a black Ghanaian father and a White German-Canadian mother who were still together.
They did cutesy things like wait with each other by their landline phone when Tara was expected to make her weekly scheduled call home. And they all spoke in excited German together when they talked.
I could barely mumble in English. I still have no idea why she picked me, the shy nerd with zero confidence, and the least dazzling of our program mates to befriend, but she did.
And when we both landed jobs in Edinburgh right before the end of our internships—Tara at the Royal Scottish Bank and me at AlgoFortune—we decided to move in together, and we’d been best friends ever since.
However, as much as I treasured my best friend, I had to admit, she had a nasty temper, one that could quickly get out of hand.
I’d literally had to pull my bestie out of bar fights on Trivia Pub Quiz nights when she got too heated.
And don’t even get me started on what she did to the drunken I-Banker bro who slapped her on the butt during the after-work drinks thing she’d invited me to last spring.
I’ll just say, he no longer works at the main branch of the Royal Scottish Bank Edinburgh. And avoiding sexual harassment charges wasn’t the only reason he put in his notice.
So, while I might feel the same way as Tara, I had no doubt my extremely loyal friend was more than capable of hunting my boss down and setting herself up for some serious assault charges if I didn’t act like Iain’s behavior wasn’t a big deal.
“Tara, it’s okay. Seriously,” I tell both her and myself. “Four instead of two more weeks working for the boss from hell won’t matter in the scheme of things.”
“No, it’s not okay! It’s totally messed up,” Tara grumbled. “That asshole’s lucky I’m visiting Brian tonight, or I’d find out where he lives, and shove his stupid hiring contract right up his ass.”
I let out a sigh of relief, almost, but not quite grateful for her horrible boyfriend.
Just a few weeks after moving to Edinburgh, Tara had met a sketchy English musician at a pub. And though I had yet to meet him, from what I could tell, he was the worst. Like, completely-undeserving-of-my-amazing-best-friend the worst.
He always made Tara visit him in Liverpool, never once deigning to make the journey to Edinburgh to hang out with Tara and her friends.
Nearly three years into our relationship and I had yet to meet the guy, let alone see a photo of him.
In fact, I wouldn’t even call what Tara and he had a relationship.
More like a long-distance booty call made worse by Tara’s slavish devotion.
As strong and loyal a friend as she could be, Tara was a complete doormat when it came to her boyfriend.
And I had learned early on that my otherwise smart friend would not budge on the topic of Brian. Tara visited him whenever he called, and once there, nothing would bring her back until Brian let her go.
Case in point: I’d called my best friend to tell her I …
1) only had eight months left to live, and
2) could not quit my job without getting sued for the last bit of money I had.
But Tara, rather predictably, threatened to do physical damage to Iain but didn’t so much as offer to come back to Edinburgh to commiserate with her dying roommate.
More self-pity washed over me as I pulled my sad microwave dinner out of the small electric oven.
But that wasn’t fair.
Tara had mostly been the best friend a meek little assistant like me could ask for in the world. It wasn’t her job to comfort me or drop all her plans to help me drown my diagnosis sorrows in several bottles of wine.
“I just wish my Brian thing wasn’t tonight. Otherwise, you know, I’d be right there with you, right?” Tara asked, her voice softening.
“I know,” I said, pushing down the self-pity. “You’re a good friend.”
“And you’re my best friend ever. I love you, Mils. And I’ll do whatever it takes to help you through thi—” Tara suddenly cut off. “Sorry, Milly, Brian just got here. I’ve got to go. I’ll call you at work first thing tomorrow, okay?”
I opened my mouth to tell her I probably wouldn’t be at work first thing tomorrow since I had to drive all the way to the Highlands to pick up the thumb drive with Iain’s rough code on it.
But she hung up before I could get the words out.
I hated driving in Scotland. Despite having lived there for nearly three years, I just couldn’t shake the feeling I was driving on the wrong side of the road every time I got behind the wheel—a wheel that was, from my perspective, located on the passenger side of the car.
And it wasn’t like I got many opportunities to drive all that often. The only reason I’d even bothered to get my international license and learn to drive a stick was because Iain had told me an assistant who couldn’t drive a car when needed wasn’t up to his standards.
My job occasionally called for me to use one of the company cars to pick up and drop off items at different tech outfits located all around the city.
And now it called for me to drive into the Highlands to pick up a thumb drive so the software development team could get as much work done as possible on it before the bank holiday weekend.
Funny, I hadn’t thought I could feel any worse than I had walking out of the doctor’s office. But driving to Iain’s childhood village in the earliest hours of the morning to pick up a thumb drive? Wow. My life, what was left of it, was hitting new lows all over the place.
However, my depression began to lift after I negotiated the Vauxhall Astra up a narrow mountain road. As it turned out, Faoltairn, the Highland village where Iain grew up, was a charming postcard of a town with a large mountain on one side and a shimmering loch on the other.
It was still very dark out, but the full moon hung heavy as a spotlight overhead, working in conjunction with the smattering of streetlights to illuminate the collection of darling stone shops on either side of the main street.
Even though it was almost June, the small village reminded me of something out of a Christmas card, with its dark green detailing and multiple windows sporting the same red plaid found on Iain’s kilts.
The main street soon gave way to a wider graveled road that wound lazily around the eastern side of a glittering loch. Little white stone cottages with thatched roofs dotted the side of the lake closest to me. And on the other side of the loch sat … no, that couldn’t be right.
But yes … there, nestled among the tall pines, stood a castle.
A small castle to be sure, but it was way more grand than the ruins I occasionally saw on the side of the road when driving around Scotland with Tara in her car (she wasn’t nearly as scared as me about the wrong side of the road thing).
The castle stood three stories tall and even had a low perimeter wall.
Whoa! I thought, just as the GPS informed me that my destination was ahead on the right.
I pulled the car to a stop in front of yet another cottage. It was slightly larger than the ones I had passed. But other than that, it looked just like all the rest—whitewashed stone walls, thatched roof, and super old.
As I got out of the car, a funny feeling came over me. Like maybe I’d somehow stepped out of my own time into a highland village from the distant past.
To add to the eerie ambiance, something that sounded an awful lot like the far-off howling of wolves punctuated the otherwise silent night.
No, not wolves, I assured myself. It had to be dogs.
I’d read wolves had been hunted to extinction in Scotland back in the 1700s. And while there were a lot of discussions happening across Scotland about possibly reintroducing the European wolf, no decisions had been made yet. I mean, At least, I don’t think they had …