One for the Road (The Macabe Brothers #3)

Prologue

March

Alistair

I couldn’t say exactly when my life had become a heaping pile of flaming shit. Maybe it was two years ago, when I’d been suspended from my inner-city GP practice for “unprofessional conduct”.

Maybe it was months before that, when I’d started riding the Glasgow Subway an extra stop on my way to work every morning, just to hold off the pandemonium that inevitably awaited me: a backlog of angry patients, mounting paperwork and not enough hours in the day.

Or maybe it was years before that, when I’d dumped my fiancée, Juniper, only weeks after her dad had died.

A life-changing conversation I’d handled in a single phone call.

Three minutes and twenty-seven seconds was all it had taken to prove to everyone in my life what a selfish arsehole I truly was.

There were probably an infinite number of tiny moments in between those milestones, micro misdeeds adding to the tapestry of a man who wasn’t worth very much. But today really took the cake.

“Please tell me you didn’t just skip out on our father’s funeral?” The hard voice of Callum, my eldest brother, filled the cab of my rented Land Rover.

My hands tightened around the wheel, the narrow slice of tarmac slipping beneath its wheels. “I stayed as long as I could,” I said. Until the coffin was in the ground, and I’d felt like my chest was ready to explode.

I barely even recalled clambering behind the wheel or tossing the crumpled copy of my dad’s will onto the passenger seat before peeling out the cemetery’s car park.

I’d meant to drive somewhere that reminded me of him.

Anywhere to scrub the image of that wooden box beneath mounds of earth from my brain.

Within minutes of driving out onto the main road, I’d realised Dad had spent so much of our childhood working, chained to his desk at Kinleith Surgery, he’d never taken us anywhere.

Not a single day trip or even a fucking picnic at the beach.

So, I’d driven the entire length of the Isle of Skye to Neist Point Lighthouse and just sat in my car, the rain lashing the windows, until my body began to tremble from the cold.

“As long as you could? Alistair! This wasn’t a family barbecue. I get that we all had our issues with him but shit – he’s still our dad.”

“You think I don’t know that?”

Our father, Jim Macabe, had been a hard man to grow up with.

He’d run his household like an army unit.

We were like Scotland’s answer to the Von Trapp family without the genetic predisposition for perfect pitch.

Even now, at thirty-seven years old, I couldn’t set foot in my parents’ house without recalling his dad stare, levelled at whichever of his four kids had pissed him off that day.

Cold and flat, like he was taking inventory of every bad choice we’d ever made.

He’d been an arsehole, to put it plainly. Short-fused. Impossible to please. And yet, weeks after he’d died, I still couldn’t shake the urge to try to live up to those unachievable standards.

It was like, at some point during my teen years, I’d become an addict and his approval was my drug of choice. With enough effort, I could craft myself into exactly the man he wanted me to be – a doctor, just like him – and in return, I’d gain his affection.

Fucking pathetic.

My hands tightened on the wheel, a sob I’d been holding in for months now working its way up my throat. “Shit, Callum, I – I’m sorry. Is Mum okay?” Had she seen me leave?

“She’s fine. Juniper and I are staying with her tonight.” Maybe I was too numb, because the guilt that should have dug into my chest like shrapnel at the sound of my ex-fiancée’s name was nothing more than a dull twinge.

Callum’s girlfriend, I reminded myself. It had been several months and that revelation was still taking some getting used to.

Talk about fucked family dynamics.

“Good,” I said, absently. “That’s good.”

“Just tell me you’re okay. I can send Mal—”

“No. Don’t bother him.” My younger brother had enough on his plate.

“I’m nearly home now anyway.” I turned my car into the blink and you miss it turning toward Kestral Cove and the little cottage I’d started renting back in December.

It wasn’t quite a home. But it was quiet.

Clean, if not for the smell of fermented cabbage I was still trying to air out of the soft furnishings (I’d come to the conclusion that the previous tenant was a hobbyist pickler).

Good enough for the few short months I planned to stay here while I sorted my shit out.

“Okay,” he clipped. The shine of taillights in the distance distracted me as he continued, “How about we meet in the morning—”

“Shit!” I cut him off. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” I pointlessly hit my indicator, coming to a stop behind an ancient pink VW Beetle.

“What’s that?” Callum asked.

“Nothing. Just a damn tourist. Must have taken a wrong turn off the main road.” There was nothing down this way except miles of fields and two little cottages perched right by the cliff edge.

My windscreen wipers were working overtime in the downpour, and I flashed my headlights, indicating they should move over – they weren’t even stopped at a passing place. “It’s really coming down out there, I can come out—” Callum offered.

Always the hero, offering a hand no matter how weird things had become between us. Guilt slithered through me. It was more than I deserved. “I’m fine.”

“I don’t think you should be alone.”

But I am alone, I wanted to say. Glasgow. Skye. It doesn’t matter.

My siblings were the only ones who reached out to me now. Family duty and all that. Who knew it only took professional ruination to find out who your true friends were?

If you’re asking stupid questions, you already know the answer. I could hear my dad, his stern voice taking up the empty passenger seat like a spectre.

My Glasgow friends were all ones I’d met in medical school.

The kind who stuck together out of habit and circumstance.

Frequenting bars from our uni days on the weekends, recounting the woes of our underfunded health service and the weird smell that always lingered in Glasgow’s Royal Infirmary over drams of whisky.

Now I’d become part of the conversational checklist at medical conferences. “Did you hear Alistair Macabe blew up his own life? And how about that new endoscopic platform . . .”

Not that I cared.

I didn’t need friends.

Who had the time or inclination to foster new relationships as an adult, anyway? I barely had time to nurture the ones I had. And even those I eventually found a way to fuck up.

You have to be selfish if you want to be successful; don’t make my mistakes.

I blinked Dad’s voice away, as though I could scrub the memory clean with enough rubbing alcohol, only half focused on Callum’s voice as he said, “I know the will reading came as a surprise, but I think it will be good for you, even if it isn’t what you planned.

Taking over Dad’s surgery means you can stay here . . . with your family.”

Dad’s surgery. The words settled in my blood like shards of ice, and I refused to look at my passenger seat, at the will. I didn’t need to read it again. I had it memorised.

And to Alistair, I leave Kinleith General Practice. Make me proud, son.

Make me proud, son. Because I hadn’t already. I mean, I’d always known that. My dad’s permanent expression had been a disapproving scowl, but to have it confirmed on paper hurt far more than it should have.

I’d spent every minute of my adult life barrelling toward one goal: becoming a senior partner at my own GP surgery before I hit forty.

Four years before my dad had earned the accolade.

Because if I couldn’t please him, I’d be damn sure to outdo him.

But then he had to go and fucking die and steal that from me too – the opportunity to earn it for myself.

Everything I’d worked for, years of late nights, working on the weekends, kissing the arses of senior doctors, personal sacrifice – all for nothing.

I swore I could already hear the village’s rumour mill running: Wee Alistair Macabe couldn’t cut it in the big city after all . . . came running back to Skye with his tail between his legs.

“I need some time to think it through,” I told Callum distractedly, my attention captured by the tourist – a woman – jumping out of the Beetle’s driver seat into the pissing rain. She rounded the car and opened the boot. Had she broken down? Fucking great.

Callum replied, but I wasn’t listening as I watched the Beetle driver through the quick slide of my wipers.

She raced back to the driver’s side and returned with a torch.

It was really coming down out there. Barely five p.m., but the swollen clouds had turned the sky the moody grey that was a constant plague on Scotland’s west coast. Despite the rain, I could see now that steam poured from the engine, and she wafted at it with small, frantic hands.

Yeah, she’d definitely broken down. Would it be a dick move to just leave?

Try to drive around her? The gap between her car and the grass verge was tight, but I could maybe do it.

In Glasgow, I would have left without a second thought. Probably wouldn’t have even noticed someone stranded on my commute. I’d have my headphones in place, nose stuck in my phone. Just the way I liked it.

My brothers would help, though.

Mal, my younger brother, would probably be able to fix it with his bare hands, or use brute strength to push her to the nearest garage.

Callum, Kinleith’s vet and small-town hero, would have somehow charmed the car into working.

Only a quick grin and a little click of his fingers required.

Not me. My knowledge of cars began and ended with the colour-coded fuel pumps.

Palming the gear stick, I eyed the steep grass verge bracketing the dirt track. My four-wheel drive could definitely stand a few minutes of off-roading . . . but, shit.