Chapter 19
Windmills stand sentinel across green pastures sliding by out the window.
The fields resemble the squares of a quilt, stitched together by seams of low stone walls.
Sheep cluster under a gray sky. All of it puts James under the illusion that he is living a past life.
A life without social media and technology.
A fantasy world where he can fall in love with the girl sleeping on his shoulder.
He resumes reading. The train rattles, and Nelle’s head slips off his shoulder.
She snorts awake, squinting at him in confusion.
“Where are we?” Two blond hairs are pasted to her cheek by a line of drool.
James wipes it away with his sleeve. “We should be getting close to Edinburgh now. You were sleeping pretty hard.”
“I was dreaming about a story Quill told me.” She yawns and stretches, oddly catlike. “You know he grew up here?”
“Yeah. His accent gave him away.”
She laughs. “I’m not sure where in Scotland he’s from, though.”
“Do you feel comfortable sharing it?” James asks. “The story?”
Nelle taps the window as if putting in a code to unlock her memory. “He grew up in a cottage. I think farther north.”
James sinks down into the train seat. Across the aisle, a middle-aged woman with a sleeping baby shoots them a dirty look.
Nelle whispers, “He had a brother, Sam. Their family didn’t have much money, so during winter when they couldn’t afford gas, their mother would make Quill and Sam a pallet in front of the stove.”
“So he wasn’t raised by a monster,” James says. “He just became one.”
“It’s no excuse for how he treated me.” Nelle traces circles on the thigh of her tan pants. “But he dealt with a lot of loss in his life.”
“Oh.” A pit opens in James’s stomach. “This story has a sad ending, doesn’t it?”
“Listen and you’ll find out,” she says. “Quill’s mother, Lily, adored words.
In her free time, when she wasn’t taking care of the house or putting together scraps to feed them, she’d analyze literature and write poetry.
She had a few collections published. Quill kept copies in his study, but he never let me read them.
Anyway, when Quill was lucky, his mother would sit him on her lap and read to him.
Old myths and folklore. He claimed his passion for stories bloomed in those misty highlands where every moor was a blood-soaked battlefield, every forest a fairy kingdom.
“His father, Thomas, was a carpenter from the States. He had a close relationship with Sam, his younger son. Would ask him to come to work with him, chop wood behind the house, or feed the livestock. But he never asked Quill. As the years went on, it became an unspoken rule: Quill belonged to Lily, Sam to Thomas. When he asked his mother why his father hated him, she assured him that Thomas merely showed his love in strange ways. Quill knew it was bullshit, though. He saw the way Sam was treated. He saw through Lily’s delusions.
His father didn’t love her, and somewhere along the way, he’d stopped loving Quill, too. ”
“Damn.” James purses his lips. “So that’s why he’s an asshole.”
“That”—Nelle nods—“among other things. Story’s not over.
On one of those harsh winter days when the loch beside the cottage was frozen over, Sam and Quill went out to skate.
Quill threw a rock across the loch, testing the ice’s stability.
It bounced and skidded across. Safe for skating.
So they went out. Quill said he felt like a bird, his arms spread wide.
About an hour later, face red and wind chapped, Quill heard a sound that would haunt him for years.
The groan of continents wrenching apart.
The ice under Sam caved in, and Quill had to watch as his little brother fell into the water.
He saw Sam’s hand pop above the ice, his face frozen in a scream, then he was gone.
Maybe taken by a creature, possibly shocked by the cold. Quill never found out.”
Nelle picks at a thread in her shirtsleeve.
“Leaving didn’t seem like an option—what if Sam resurfaced and needed his help climbing up?
—so Quill screamed for their parents until his voice gave out.
Jumping in after Sam didn’t cross his mind.
That water was death. When Quill eventually returned to the cottage, he told his mother that Sam was dead.
She didn’t cry. When his father came home, tired and sweaty, she broke the news to him.
Quill stood behind her. His father dropped to his knees in the doorway.
It was the first time he’d ever cried in front of them.
And Quill hated it. The last time he saw his father cry was a year later, at his mother’s funeral.
On that awful day, he remembered thinking that maybe, maybe, his father really did love her, somewhere beneath his own layers of ice.
“A week later, Thomas claimed he had nothing to live for in Scotland anymore, so he moved them to Georgia, where he had family. Living family. Quill never saw that cottage again, nor the lake that would forever serve as Sam Quill’s grave.”
James blinks as he processes all this. “That’s an awful story to tell a child.”
“Quill didn’t talk to me like a child. Unless he was being condescending.
” Nelle watches out the window at the stone city rushing past. “He’s a twisted man, but I know he wanted me to understand why he did what he did.
Why he was who he was to me. But it still makes me wonder why he told me about the cottage.
Why I’m dreaming about it now. When he found me in DC, he said he saw me in a dream.
What if I’m supposed to find the cottage? What if he meant for me to?”
The cold determination in Nelle’s jaw makes James’s stomach drop.
“He never told me any other stories about his childhood. Nothing. Think about it . . . why would he have given me a birth certificate? A passport?”
James doesn’t believe that a man who only allowed Nelle out of the house a handful of times in twenty-one years would ever send her alone on a scavenger hunt through Scotland.
“I can’t explain it.” She sits up straighter. “It’s just a feeling I have. I’m supposed to find this cottage. That’s all I know.”
James sighs. In the short time he has known Nelle, has she given him a reason not to trust her gut? If she wants to dance on a roof in a thunderstorm, they do it. If she is ready to leave New York, they do it. If she wants to track down her dad-captor’s childhood home, then damn it . . .
He gives Nelle’s hand a supportive squeeze. “Let’s do it.”