CHAPTER ELEVEN
Tala
Scotland smells different from every other place I've played golf.
It smells ancient. Peat and brine and cold stone and a particular quality of wet grass that has nothing to do with irrigation — this grass has been wet since before anyone thought to build a golf course on it.
The air is heavier than Singapore but cooler, sharper, carrying a mineral edge that stings the inside of my nose when I breathe deeply.
We arrive two days before the tournament.
The course at St Andrews is a links layout — no trees, no defined boundaries between holes, just undulating ground covered in fescue that moves like water when the wind crosses it.
The terrain rolls in waves, and the bunkers are carved so deep that standing in one feels like standing in a grave.
It's the most alien golf course I've ever seen.
It's also the most beautiful.
Nerys has been quiet since we landed. Not withdrawn — quiet in a way that suggests she's processing something the way her body processes changes in weather: involuntarily, through systems that predate conscious thought.
She holds her course notebook but doesn't open it.
She walks the holes beside me during our initial reconnaissance, pointing out features, naming hazards, describing wind patterns — but her voice carries an undertone I haven't heard before.
Her hands shake during the walk.
Not the yips. I know the difference now.
The yips are specific — they affect fine motor control, the ability to execute a precise movement under pressure.
What's happening to Nerys's hands on the seventh fairway at St Andrews is something broader.
A tremor that lives in the wrists and radiates upward through the forearms. Not neurological.
Emotional. Her body remembering a version of this landscape that came before the collapse, before the divorce, before everything she lost.
The last time she was here, she was still a champion.
I don't mention the tremor. I walk beside her and I listen to her describe the fourteenth hole's wind exposure and I pretend I don't see her flex her fingers at her sides, trying to press the shaking out.
·
On the second morning, a storm arrives.
Not a passing squall — a full Scottish coastal storm that comes off the North Sea like a wall. Rain hammers the hotel windows horizontally. The wind reaches forty miles per hour. The tournament committee cancels all practice rounds and issues a terse advisory about remaining indoors.
Nerys stands at the hotel window watching the storm with an expression that is neither apprehension nor excitement. It's recognition. She looks like a woman greeting something she's known for a long time.
"I rented a cottage," she says.
"What?"
"Outside town. Near the coast. A stone cottage my father used to rent during the summer months when he brought me here as a teenager." She doesn't turn from the window. "I'd like to take you there. If you're willing."
I am willing. I don't know what I'm willing for — a cottage visit, an emotional excavation, another revelation from a woman who parcels out her history like prize money, in careful increments calculated to balance vulnerability against stability.
I say yes.
We drive in a rental car through rain so dense the wipers can barely manage.
The road narrows as we leave town — stone walls on either side, sheep visible as gray smudges in the fields, the landscape reduced to charcoal and water.
Nerys drives. Her hands are steady on the wheel.
The tremor from yesterday is absent, replaced by the focused competence of a woman executing a task she understands.
The cottage is small. Stone walls the color of old smoke. A slate roof. A wooden door that sticks in the frame when Nerys pushes it open, as if the house has been holding its breath.
Inside: two rooms. A sitting room with a fireplace already laid — the rental company, presumably — and a narrow bedroom visible through an open door.
Low ceilings. Deep windows. The walls are rough stone dressed with plaster, and the air smells like peat and old wool and the particular variety of dampness that comes from a building constructed before the concept of insulation.
And on the walls, framed behind glass, are course maps.
Not Nerys's maps. These are older, drawn on paper that has yellowed at the edges, annotated in handwriting that is not hers — larger, less precise, slanting right instead of left.
Pencil marks. Course features labeled in a mix of English and Welsh.
Elevation changes indicated by concentric lines that I recognize from the tattoo on Nerys's ribs.
Her father's maps.
Nerys stands in the center of the room looking at them the way a person looks at a photograph of someone they've lost — not to death but to something less definitive and harder to grieve.
"He made these when I was twelve," she says. "We spent three summers here. He walked every course within driving distance and mapped them by hand. He'd wake me at five and take me out barefoot, and I'd feel the slopes through my feet while he drew them in his notebook."
She touches the glass over one of the maps. Her fingers trace the contour lines — the same lines tattooed on her body, the same lines I've kissed along her ribs.
"He was brilliant," she says. "Everyone loved him. His students adored him. He was patient and thorough and he never raised his voice and he could explain a wind pattern to a fourteen-year-old in a way that made her feel like she understood the entire atmosphere."
I sit on the stone hearth. The fire isn't lit. The rain hammers the roof. I don't speak because Nerys is not speaking to me. She's speaking to the room. To the maps. To the version of her father preserved in pencil lines on yellowed paper.
"He was different with me than with his students.
Not cruel. Never cruel. But colder. When a student struggled, he was endlessly gentle — he'd adjust their grip, modify their stance, reassure them that struggle was part of the process.
When I struggled, his jaw would tighten and his voice would become precise and he would say, 'Again.
' Just 'again.' No reassurance. No explanation of why it was hard.
Just the expectation that his daughter should not need to be told what his students needed to hear. "
She sits across from me. The space between us is three feet of stone floor and decades of a wound she's been carrying like a bag on her shoulder.
"When the yips started, I called him. I was terrified. I couldn't make my hands execute a stroke I'd performed ten thousand times. Something had broken between my brain and my fingers, and I didn't understand it and I needed someone to tell me it wasn't my fault."
"What did he say?"
"He asked whether I'd been doing my putting drills. Whether I'd maintained the practice schedule. Whether I'd modified my grip without consulting someone. He treated the yips the way he'd treat a mechanical failure — as evidence of insufficient maintenance."
"And the collapse? The six-putt hole?"
"He was in the gallery. I could see him.
After I withdrew, he didn't come to the locker room.
He didn't call that night. He called two weeks later.
His first question was whether I'd changed my putting grip.
" She pauses. "His second question was whether I'd considered that the problem was mental rather than mechanical.
As if acknowledging a psychological component would require a different repair manual. "
The rain fills the silence. Sheets of it, relentless, turning the world outside the cottage windows into gray noise.
"He wasn't cruel," Nerys says again, as if saying it twice makes it more true or less. "He just couldn't separate my golf from my worth. When I played well, I was evidence of his teaching. When I failed, I was evidence that his teaching had limits. He couldn't tolerate the limits."
"And you inherited it."
She looks at me. Startled. Not at the observation — at the accuracy of it arriving from someone she didn't expect to see her that clearly.
"Yes. I inherited it. My hands failed and I treated myself the way he would have treated me — as a system with a malfunction, not a person in distress.
I dismantled my practice routines. I changed my grip seventeen times.
I consulted biomechanists and neurologists and a sports psychologist I abandoned after three sessions because she kept asking me how I felt and I kept telling her I felt like someone whose hands didn't work. "
"Nerys."
"Saskia tried. She tried so hard to reach me. She'd hold my hands and tell me they were just hands and they didn't define me, and I would lie next to her and think, you don't understand, they are the only part of me that ever mattered, and they are broken."
I stand. Cross the three feet of stone floor. Sit beside her. Not touching — beside. Our shoulders an inch apart.
"My mother taught me the same thing from the other direction," I say.
"She told me talent was so rare that wasting it was ungrateful.
That the family gave up too much for me to play safe.
That hesitation was the same as disrespect.
She didn't use the word coward, but she built a system where slowing down felt like cowardice, and I internalized it so completely that by the time I was twenty, attacking every shot felt like the only way to deserve what I had. "
"Your mother loves you."
"Your father loves you. That's not incompatible with the damage."
Nerys is quiet. The rain is quieter now — still heavy, but steadier, the fury settling into endurance.
"I know," she says.
I take her hand. The right one. The scarred thumb.
I hold it in both of mine and I look at the fire that isn't lit and I think about two women sitting in a cottage in Scotland while a storm rearranges the landscape outside, both of them carrying wounds inflicted by parents who loved them too much to see them clearly.