Chapter 43 Summer
FORTY-THREE
SUMMER
An hour later, I’m warm and cosy in bed, my damp hair wrapped in a towel. I can hear the men moving around the farmhouse—Cameron clattering dishes, and Alec moving furniture. My mind is unusually clear after hours working outside. Today is the best day I’ve had in a long, long time.
I roll over, and my eyes fall on my phone charging on the bedside table. My good mood immediately dissolves.
I wonder how the video is doing. Are more people seeing it? Are more people writing stories about me?
I suddenly feel sick. I sit up, heart thudding, and reach for my phone.
Sure, I said I’d delete my social media, but it can’t hurt to check what people are saying about me, right?
It scares me to think that the hate might be growing and I wouldn’t even know it.
I go to Picturegram in the app store, and my thumb hovers over the download button. I bite my lip. I shouldn’t. But…
There’s a knock on the door, and I jump up guiltily to answer it. Alec is on the other side. His black hair is damp from his shower, and he’s wearing a white jumper that looks impossibly soft. He’s silent for a moment, admiring my silky camisole.
“Hi!” I say breathlessly. “Is it dinner?”
He nods. “I have something to show you first.”
“Ooh. My surprise?”
He nods, offering me a hand.
Alec leads me into the living room. Cameron and Fraser are setting the table, but he draws me past them, towards the corner by the fire.
“Here.” He’s pulled out the vintage Singer sewing machine and set it up next to a wooden chair and reading lamp.
A sewing basket tucked at its feet is overflowing with scraps of fabric and shears.
There’s a pile of thread bobbins and tomato pincushions arranged on a nearby table.
For a moment, I can’t speak. “What?” I whisper.
Alec clears his throat. “I looked online for how to service the machine, and I pulled out all of my mum’s old thread and fabric bits,” he explains. “We can go into town tomorrow and buy anything you need.”
I stare at him. “I…You mean…I can use it?”
He nods calmly. “Please.”
Oh my God. I float closer, running my fingers along the wrought iron frame. “Are you sure? This is a collector’s piece—”
“It’s just gathering dust. My mum would want it to be used.
She loved to sew.” He watches as I finger the gold filigree and lightly spin the handwheel.
It turns as smoothly as butter. I can’t believe it.
“I thought it might help,” he says quietly.
“I know you’re disappointed your deal fell through.
But I figured you could play with your own designs this way. ”
The wave of emotion that crashes over me is overwhelming. I throw myself at him. “Thank you,” I say. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!”
He’s still for a moment and then hugs me back hard. “I just hope it helps,” he says into my hair.
“You two,” Cameron calls from the kitchen. “Dinner.”
We pull apart and traipse over to the dining table. Cameron is ladling out stew and dumplings. He sets a steaming bowl in front of me as I settle down in my seat, still brimming over with excitement.
Fraser flops into the chair opposite me. “Evening,” he tells me cheerfully. “What excellent pyjamas.” I feel his foot trail up my calf. I nudge him back, and there’s an irritated baa.
I peer under the table. Crumpet is sitting there, her damp little nose whiffling.
“Oh, hi, baby.” I bend to stroke her ears. She pads in a circle and flops down on my foot. “How’s she doing?”
“Much better now that she’s up here,” Fraser says. “She’s getting into everything. Lively wee thing, she just needed a bit of extra help.” He takes a bite of stew. “So how’d you like your first taste of farm life?”
“I had a really good day,” I say honestly.
He nods at my phone by the side of my plate. “And the work stuff?”
I fiddle with a piece of carrot. “I’m scared of what everyone’s saying,” I admit. “I was actually about to look myself up when you called me for dinner.”
Alec passes me some bread. “Do you want me to take your phone?”
“What?”
“It might help you relax.”
I frown. “I kind of need it. I have my whole alarm system. It’s the only way I get anything done.”
“What do you need to get done?” he asks. “You’re not working.”
Well. That’s true. I check my alarm app. “I guess the only one I need is the one reminding me to take my meds. I really can’t forget that.”
“I’ll remind you,” Alec says smoothly.
My cheeks flush. “You don’t have to do that.”
“It’s no bother.”
“You should let him,” Fraser suggests, quaffing elderflower cordial. “Sometimes I’ll tell him ‘hey, remind me to book the truck in for an MOT in nine months,’ and he genuinely does.”
“It’s no trouble if it helps you,” Alec adds. “I want you to be able to relax.”
“I mean. If you don’t mind…”
“Of course not.” He holds out his hand, and I pass my phone over. “They’re ADHD meds? Have you been on them long?”
I start to eat. The stew is delicious, savoury and flavoured with herbs.
“Since I was eighteen. We knew I was dyslexic in primary school, but I was very good at subconsciously hiding the ADHD, so I didn’t get diagnosed with that until, like, right before my A-levels.
Not ideal timing. I had a whole meltdown, and the school librarian was like, ‘So this isn’t actually normal. ’”
I had what was, in retrospect, a panic attack in the back cupboard of the library.
It was like I was drowning. I was studying so much I barely slept, and the harder I tried, the less I could remember.
I felt like I had a running list of twenty million things I needed to think about at all times, and if I let anything slip the tiniest bit, I’d fall apart.
And that time, I actually did.
“You subconsciously hid it, eh?” Fraser says. “Impressive.”
“Yeah. Like, I knew I was different in some way. I struggled with things everyone else seemed to do without thinking. And I was always getting told off when I didn’t feel like I was doing anything wrong.
So I learned to tone myself down and act like everyone else.
” I frown. “Not that I was very good at it. All my teachers thought I was slow. Or oversensitive. Or messy.”
“And the meds help you?” Alec asks.
“Yep.” I take another bite of food. “They mess with my appetite though. Sometimes I get to six p.m. and realise I haven’t eaten, so I have to consume a full day’s worth of food in one sitting. But don’t worry, I am up to the task!”
Cameron’s chair scrapes out. “Don’t,” he barks.
I blink at him. He’s scowling at me. “Um, what?”
“Don’t do that,” he orders. “Eat better.”
“I mean, I try…”
“You don’t have to try,” he says darkly. “I’ll feed you.”
Fraser barks a laugh. “Oh, you have no idea what you just started, angel. You’re about to be waited on hand and foot for the rest of your time here. Cameron’s love language is cooking an entire roast dinner for someone and then vanishing into thin air.”
Cameron’s cheeks colour.
“So the meds help you think clearer?” Alec asks, touching my knee.
I nod. “And I get stuck less.”
“Stuck?” His thumb strokes my thigh.
I shiver. “Um, yes. Sometimes I sort of…freeze. I can’t work out what to do next, and everything seems too hard, and the thought of doing anything is so unbearably boring that I start to feel really depressed. It’s hard to get out of.”
Alec tilts his head as he considers that. I have to laugh. “You can’t imagine it, can you? I bet you’ve always been great at getting stuff done.” He gets out of bed at four a.m. with a to-do list, methodically works through it, and just doesn’t stop until everything is checked off.
“I’ve never really struggled with getting things done, no,” he agrees.
I suddenly feel self-conscious. “I know it seems sort of made up, but it genuinely is way harder for people with ADHD to complete tasks. I’m not just bad at self-discipline.”
“Of course you’re not. I believe you.”
I blink, taken aback. “You do?” I look at his hand on my leg. “Most people don’t, I don’t think. Even after I got diagnosed, my mum never really believed it.”
“Your mum sounds kinda rubbish, London,” Fraser offers, eating a bread roll in two bites.
“Oh, no, I didn’t mean to give that impression. She’s just so smart and driven. It’s really hard for her to imagine that not everyone’s brain is built the same, I guess.” I shake my head. “It’s fine. I just wish I got diagnosed sooner. I failed most of my A-levels. She was so disappointed in me.”
She’d spent so much money getting me private tutors.
She had her heart set on a nice university for me.
She just couldn’t understand that the things that came effortlessly to her felt basically impossible to me.
I remember sitting in the exam hall with my hands jammed over my ears, getting desperately distracted by the sound of the invigilator’s footsteps and the ruffle of other peoples’ pages.
I could barely even read the questions. Nothing made sense.
It was a lot of time and money down the drain.
“That’s more A-levels than I got,” Alec says, sipping his wine.
“What?”
“I dropped out at seventeen.”
My mouth falls open. “You dropped out of school?”
His mouth quirks. “Is that so hard to believe? I had a job set up for me from the moment I was born.”
“Yes, but you’re such…such hot-professor vibes,” I blurt out.
“Hot-professor vibes,” he repeats, looking like he’s trying not to smile.
“Am I hot-farmer vibes?” Fraser demands. “Call me hot too, quickly.”
“You just seem really…academic, I guess? You’re so smart. You have sixty million classics in your bedroom. You have a copy of War and Peace, Alec. A copy that’s been read.”
He just shrugs. “I loved school. I loved books. But managing Lochview was more important, so I dropped out.”
“No,” Cameron says flatly. “You didn’t. Don’t lie.” He mops his bowl out with bread. “His dad took him out of school,” he tells me. “Against his will.”
The temperature in the room drops.
“Well,” Alec says calmly, “I didn’t fight him on it.”
“’Course you didn’t. He was terrifying. Doesn’t mean you chose it,” Cameron growls. “Your dad decided you working was more important than you getting an education, so he forced you to drop out and work eighteen-hour days as a seventeen-year-old boy.”
Alec doesn’t deny it. “It was a year after my mum died. I’d told him that I was planning to go to university after I got my A-levels,” he tells me.
“We had a big argument about it, and he decided it was best to stop my education. In hindsight, he was right.” His watch beeps, and he checks the time.
“I should go. I have some paperwork to finish.” He kisses my hair, stands, and leaves the room.
I watch him go, my heart beating in my throat. “That seriously happened?”
“He just stopped showing up at school,” Fraser tells me.
“Out of the blue. We’d just got our grades back from our mocks, and he’d gotten an offer from Oxford.
Apparently, his dad didn’t like that. Next thing we knew, he stopped coming to school, stopped answering his phone.
A whole month went by, and no one knew where he was.
We thought he’d died. We kept going to the farm, and Mr Gray kept telling us to go away.
We had to wait until he was outta town, and then we snuck in.
” His normally cheerful expression clouds over.
“Alec was in a bit of a state when we found him.”
“What do you mean?”
“He was locked in a shed,” Cameron says flatly. “Mucking out the animals. It was four degrees out, and his hands were shredded because he hadn’t been given gloves.”
“What? He was locked in?”
“Mr Gray was ‘teaching him work ethic,’ apparently. He’d confiscated his phone and computer, so he couldn’t reach out to anyone.” Cameron’s face is twisted. “He was a mess. Mr Gray had him working every minute of the day. Wouldn’t let him take weekends. Wouldn’t let him leave.”
“It’s why we started working on the farm,” Fraser adds.
“To keep an eye on him. We weren’t sure Mr Gray wouldn’t…
I don’t know. Hurt him. Mr Gray didn’t want to let us at first, of course, but he sweetened up when he realised he could pay us peanuts because we were minors.
Things got a bit better after that. He certainly never locked Alec in a shed again.
Was still a bastard though.” He tips his glass at Cameron.
“God, remember how you and Isla used to smuggle him books from the school library ’cause Mr Gray wouldn’t let him read? ”
I’m horrified. “That’s horrible.”
“Aye,” Cameron says. “Worst part is, Alec tried his heart out for him. And he still does now. He’s still working himself to death for his dad.”
I feel my eyes burn. Fraser makes a sad noise. “No. Don’t cry, angel. Not over a dead man. Come on.” He stands and offers me his hand. “Let’s get you to bed.”
As we head down the corridor, we walk past Alec’s office. I can hear him tapping away at his keyboard as if nothing is wrong.