Chapter 6
Six
NOAH
Icame down late that night, after a particularly long nap, because I was still wrestling with jet lag. The inn had the gentle quiet that isn’t silence—old-house quiet, radiators ticking and the walls settling and sighing. I followed the warmth to the lounge and stopped in the doorway.
Skye was decorating the tree by herself.
It wasn’t a grand tree—nothing that screamed hotel lobby.
It was a stubborn, well-meaning Scots pine that looked like it had picked its way home across the fields.
She’d dragged it into the corner near the hearth and strung the bottom half in lights while the other half waited like an unlit promise.
There was a plastic tub of ornaments open on the rug, a tangle of paper chains she’d clearly made by hand, and a mug steamed at her elbow.
The fire threw copper into her hair, and she’d kicked off her shoes and wore those socks with little pom-poms at the ankles.
And she was singing.
Not loud. Not performing. Just the soft, automatic singing you do when your hands are busy and you forget anyone could be listening—low and warm and a little husky where the day had sanded it down. It was a song I didn’t know, which annoyed me in a petty way because I used to know all her songs.
You can spend years pretending you don’t remember the precise temperature of someone’s voice, and then one note finds the tuning fork in your ribs and everything you’ve built shivers on its foundation. I leaned on the doorframe and let it happen because some mistakes you have to witness to fix.
She looked up at the shift of light. Saw me. The song cut off with a swallow.
“You missed tea,” she said. Which in Skye language meant how much of that did you hear?
“Couldn’t sleep last night, and I slept too long now.” I held up hands. “I heard you fighting a losing battle with a string of lights and thought I’d offer diplomatic assistance.”
“They’re feral,” she said, deadpan. “They came out of the box as a knot with a superiority complex.”
“Hand them over, then.”
“It’s your funeral,” she warned, but she passed me the snarled knot anyway.
Up close she smelled like lemon and sugar. She’d gotten glitter on her cheekbone, traitorous stuff that has the survival instincts of a cockroach. I had the sudden, stupid urge to lick it off her face and had to move backward to avoid becoming a headline.
I took the lights to the hearth rug and started the ritual—free a loop, swear, roll, pass under, curse again. In the meantime, Skye slowly dug through a box of ornaments, unwrapping each one and holding it in front of her for a moment.
“You’re humming,” I said after a minute, because I like to make my own trouble. “You always hum when you’re nervous.”
“I always hum when I’m working,” she corrected. “It keeps the ghosts from making suggestions.”
“Your gran thanked me for fixing the radiator in the blue room,” I said before I could stop my mouth.
One of the reasons I’d woken so suddenly from my nap was that I’d sensed a presence in my room.
Even now, I still wasn’t sure if I’d been dreaming or awake.
When I’d slitted my eyes open, Skye’s gran had been in the corner in a sliver of light and had offered me thanks.
She’d also told me not to give up on her granddaughter before she’d winked out of sight.
I’d closed my eyes again, my heart hammering, and now I was only partially certain it had just been a dream.
She paused. “Did she, now?”
“She’s very persuasive.”
“That’s a nice way to phrase it,” she said, but the edge of a smile had snuck up on her mouth. “I thought I saw her as well, but I put it down to stress.”
My eyebrows drew up.
Had we really been visited by a ghost? But Skye’s smile was pained, and the lines on her forehead tight, and I didn’t want to make a big deal about it if she wasn’t comfortable discussing it more deeply.
“That’s fair. I was probably still dreaming.” I glanced over at her, trying to judge her mood. “It was nice to see her, even if it was just a dream. Do you miss her?”
“Aye.” Skye shrugged but offered nothing else. Perhaps it was too much to hope that she’d share more of her life with me.
“The radiator still sounds like an asthmatic accordion, by the way. I’ll have another go in the morning. I picked up more keys at the store.”
“Thank you,” she said, quietly and real in a way that made me feel unsteady.
I freed the last loop. Held up the lights like a fish I’d just caught. “Victory.”
“You’ve got glitter on your face,” she said, amused.
“You’ve got glitter on your soul,” I said and then when her mouth rounded, I immediately felt awkward for what I’d just said. Had that been too romantic? Too complimentary? Navigating conversations with Skye right now made me feel like I was picking my way through a minefield.
“Come on, let’s test these.”
Skye bent and plugged the lights in and they blinked obediently, warm and soft. She made a small, pleased noise she probably didn’t know she made, and my stupid heart obligingly fell down a flight of stairs.
She used to make that pleased noise in bed with me, after making love, and right before she drifted off to sleep. I wanted her to make that sound for me again.
Instead, I stood, and we strung the lights together, doing that instinctive dance two people do when their bodies remember being a team. Soon enough, the tree was well lit, and I stood back, pleased with our work.
“Star or angel?” I asked.
“Gran liked the star,” she said, digging in the box, then surfaced with a brass ornament that had been polished within an inch of its life. “It’s older than I am, I think.”
“Up you go, then.”
I held the chair while she set the star, doing my best to not admire her bum that was dangerously close to my face.
Who was I kidding? I was one hundred percent admiring her bum. I wanted to lean in and bite it, but that would likely get me a swat to the head or her tumbling off the chair.
“Not bad,” I said, admiring our work so far.
“Ornaments now,” she said briskly, and crouched by the box. “These are the good ones. Don’t manhandle them. If you break an heirloom, my gran will haunt you.”
“I honestly don’t know if that’s a joke or not,” I said, and sat on the rug with her because it felt cozy. I needed some cozy in my life.
She held up a glass bauble with a crack running through it like a tiny lightning bolt. “This one’s from when I was six and thought glitter glue could repair anything.”
“Was it a wrong assumption?”
“Glitter glue repairs nothing and resides everywhere,” she said. “Like hope. Or mold.”
I took a tiny wooden stag ornament and held it up.
“We had one like this in my mum’s box. Remember how she’d invite everyone over for decorating the Christmas tree?
” I asked, and then immediately hated myself for throwing the past into the room like a lit match.
Skye had lost her parents young, when she’d been just a baby, and most in Kingsbarns had collectively joined to help her grandparents raise her, my parents included.
But Skye didn’t flinch.
“Your mum used to come to the carols, too,” she said, softly. “She stood at the back and sang like she didn’t want to, and then on the last verse gave it her all.”
“Sounds like her.”
“She used to plait my hair in the school yard when my gran was too busy.”
“She told me once you had more patience than I did,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about that every time you untangle some tinsel.”
She looked down into the box. “Untangling is not the same as fixing.”
“It’s a start.”
Our eyes met over the box, and I wanted more than anything to reach out, to pull her close, and to see if we still could sing the same harmony together. Instead, I bent my head and pulled out another ornament and handed it to Skye.
We laughed over the ornaments as Skye hung them.
A crocheted bell that had seen love and dust. A paper angel whose head was taped on.
A unicorn I’d have bet a month’s wages came from the pub.
A star shaped from foil sweet wrappers, a faded tartan bow.
None of it matched. All of it was exactly right.
She hummed again, and I found myself sliding under her melody out of muscle memory, not loud, just there. Harmony was a trust fall. Before, she would have leaned into it without thinking. Now she stilled, then let it happen. The knot between my ribs loosened enough to breathe.
“You remember the Glasgow garage?” she asked.
“Which one?”
“The one where we rehearsed the week before the Dumfries gig. You left the amp at home because you were sure you could ‘coax tone’ out of the room.”
“It was a very tonal room.”
“It was a damp cave that smelled like cabbage.”
“You wrote the bridge to Five a.m. on the floor with your foot tapping in those worn Doc Martens,” I said, the memory unfolding itself. “We kept the foot tap in the demo. You can hear it if you know where to listen.”
“First time we figured out we could fight without breaking the song,” she said. “Second time was that pub in Perth. The one with the carpet that made everyone’s feet stick.”
“‘Stickier than sin,’” I recited, because her gran had said it once and we’d used it in a song. “You sang like the ceiling was listening.”
“The ceiling was listening because it was falling,” she said, and the smile she gave me then belonged to the girl who once dared me to busk a busy farmers market on a warm summer morning in July.
We hung in easy silence for a few minutes, putting the finishing touches on the tree.
“Do you still write?” I asked the question that had been burning the back of my tongue since I’d walked in and she’d broken me open with a hum.
She fiddled with an ornament of a dove as if it had suddenly become very interesting. “I write lists.”
“Skye.”
“I run an inn,” she said, which was not an answer, and we both knew it.
“You run an inn and what else?”
“And,” she admitted, quietly, “sometimes I write … bits. Lines. The middle of a thing that doesn’t exist yet.”