Chapter 6 #3
She hovered her fingers and looked at her words.
They were true, given what she’d seen today of shuttered shops and thinly scattered businesses.
This whole venture felt hopeless before she’d even seen the ski centre.
She tried to picture either of her brothers staying here and taking this assignment seriously, and somehow, she couldn’t imagine it.
A thought struck her.
Had her father sent her here because this job was the smallest of small fry to come across his consultancy desk in ages?
Would the company have turned it down if he didn’t happen to have an erstwhile daughter ripe for a trial assignment, the likes of which her brothers could handle in their sleep, a means of testing whether he can trust her with a real job?
Without thinking any further, she deleted her message and typed a new one.
As expected, it’s hopeless.
She sent the reply back to Aspen. If he wanted hard-nosed and efficient, that’s what she was giving, one hundred per cent.
To wash away the bad taste this left in her mouth, she composed a far sweeter message and sent it to her mum.
Hei, how are you guys? I’m still busy busy busy! Miss you. I’ll come see you after the holidays, maybe, if you like? Heading to bed now. Early night. These kids tired me out today! Love, F, xoxo
She watched the message fly to her mother’s phone somewhere in Oslo where she was living with her new husband and his kids, like that was something she’d ever even have considered doing before the newlyweds met twelve months ago on a ‘gong sound bath’ meditation retreat and her mum had fallen headlong in love.
She couldn’t quite believe that her free-spirited, gentle mother could be happy leaving their beloved old family home to go to the city and look after someone else’s kids. Like she’s his au pair or something, Florrie thought glumly.
A reply pinged back immediately.
Ja takk, come and see us. We long to welcome you home. Can’t you ask the Lamontagnes for Christmas off? Surely they won’t mind? I miss you, x
Home? Was she calling that place home already?
It would never be home to Florrie. She wasn’t part of their new family.
Her mother was running someone else’s kids to high school and sports meets every day, cooking her omma’s favourite old recipes for strangers, living a life Florrie couldn’t recognise.
Florrie closed the messaging app before she piled up any more lies on top of the offence of neglecting to tell her mother about Scotland.
There was something awful and a little bit frightening about her innocently thinking Florrie was still in the French Alps when she was secretly here on a mission from the man whose very name her mum couldn’t tolerate to hear mentioned.
With a heart even heavier than it was before, she scrolled Instagram for hours, trying to salve her conscience, scattering her feed with love hearts beneath pictures of her many friends and old host families in snowy resorts all over the world, seeing the changing faces of children she’d once-upon-a-time ferried to and from schools, babies she’d mashed bananas for, now big kids, and their white-teeth-grinning parents taking time out from the rat race to play in the snow.
It was a rolling picture mosaic of all the lives that had touched hers these last ten years.
Christingle candles held close to angelic little faces, wrapped up warm at the Christmas markets, glasses of schnapps raised in toast at the lens, combined family efforts to place a star at the top of a glittering tree, and captions posted underneath in German and French and Italian.
All of these lives she had, for a time, been closely interwoven with, and every one of them had gone on happily without her while she’d restlessly flown from nest to nest, never quite at home anywhere.
The light from her phone hurt her eyes but she scrolled on, looking for a sign she was doing the right thing.
On the other side of Cairn Dhu, another person surveilled a world he felt increasingly isolated from.
Rain streaked down the dark glass of the nightclub’s slope-view windows.
Reflected, his dark silhouette rubbed a hand over a stubbling jaw.
Hamish Skelton had waited all day, readying himself as best he could, collecting the paperwork from the accountants, restocking and cleaning until he was out of breath and wound tight like a spring.
The consultant hadn’t even bothered to show up.
That couldn’t bode well for the future of his home and his business.
It was unavoidable: he’d be out on his ear before Christmas.
He asked himself where he’d go. He didn’t know how to do anything but be here in this place. It was all he’d known and all he wanted to do. This was his business, in his town, and it made up his entire life.
Resignedly, he called it a night, locking the Ptarmigan doors and trudging up the metal stairs to his apartment.
‘As expected,’ he said to the empty room where his freshly made bed waited to receive his weary body. ‘It’s hopeless.’