500 Miles from You (Scottish Bookshop #3)(73)

Of me being a coward, probably.

Of you getting better, maybe.

Lissa looked around the garden, the evening scents of the cooling grass hanging heavy in the still air. It was lovely, even if it was getting horribly overgrown. The stream tinkled prettily.

This place is quite special.

It is. So is London.

Is this about meat buns again?

Yeah probably.

Anyway, why are you asking?

I just . . . I think it might be a bit the same as the army.

Lissa didn’t say anything, just sat and waited, the little glowing phone in her hand, the center of her world right then. And Cormac poured it all out, typing as if his life depended on it, his spelling all over the place. Telling her about the hideous injuries, the pointless pain, the children caught in the cross fire; the waste of all of it. How he couldn’t sleep, couldn’t stop worrying about it. How he had come home, and his mother was ashamed of him, and he felt like a coward for leaving his comrades. She read it all, patiently and carefully. And at the end of it, she typed just two words.

I know.

And she signed it off with a kiss. And Cormac held his phone to his chest, close, just as, five hundred miles away, Lissa was doing exactly the same thing, as if they were holding each other’s hearts in their hands.





Chapter 57


Oh, the luxury, the rare luxury, of waking on a sunny Sunday morning with nothing to do and someone else to think about.

Once upon a time this would have made Lissa panic. She would have felt lonely and worried that she was living in the center of the greatest city in the world and not making the most of it. She would have been entirely concerned that she was wasting time, desperately checking her Insta to see if her friends had been up to something fun that she would have wanted to go to; pinging her mates immediately to see if anyone was up to anything, while trying not to look too needy; worrying if her mother was coming into town, who would want to complain about her hair or her living conditions, or why she didn’t just look at these brochures for research chemistry—she’d been so good at chemistry at school, and there were all sorts of interesting careers that could spin off it now, it wasn’t just in labs you know, you could travel all over the world . . .

But there was something about living in Kirrinfief that had changed all that, she could tell. Something about being perfectly content with your own company—you had to be in a region the size of London but with eight thousand people living in it instead of eight million. If you wanted company you could simply wander into the village and someone you knew would come along immediately; you could head down to the fair or the pub and find yourself caught up in whatever came along. If there was anything to do—a fiddle band playing, a community play, Nina running a book reading—everybody went automatically. And if there wasn’t, you stayed in and suited yourself. In the middle of nowhere, she found, she didn’t feel lonely at all. She was so far removed from everything she couldn’t possibly be worried about missing anything. And what was she missing anyway?

Nonetheless, she thought, stretching luxuriously, the sun making panes on the duvet. She would putter into town, buy something nice, and actually cook for herself; pick up some of the Lennox farm eggs, which were fine, fine things indeed; buy a book from Nina and sit in the sun; maybe see what Zoe was up to. Zoe always seemed happy to have her around, even if there was never a moment when Zoe didn’t have about five people climbing all over her. She didn’t seem to mind a bit. Lissa occasionally wondered if she didn’t actually bother counting up however many people were in her kitchen at any one time. Then tonight she’d open a bottle of wine and call Kim-Ange and see how her date had gone and they could laugh about hers being a bit of a disaster, which would help, and maybe—maybe—she would tell her about her and Cormac. But tell her what, truly? That they emailed and texted a lot? Kim-Ange had met plenty of men who were happy to chat online, but when it came to meeting, everything changed.

She walked across the quiet kitchen, which she had grown to love in its understated way, and boiled the kettle and was briefly startled by the rattle of the postman at the letter box. Little arrived for Cormac except bills and circulars. She needed to send him his statements, actually. She smiled to herself. The post office was open until lunchtime, so she would go and do that. She liked the women who worked there, and they also sold incredible cheese and local bacon on the side (nobody in the Highlands had only one job really), so that would give her a little purpose to her morning, which would somehow allow her to spend the entire afternoon lazing around, having completed her errand. And maybe, she thought. Maybe talking to Cormac.

She picked up the letters. Two political leaflets for parties she’d never heard of, one in a language she couldn’t read, and then, to her great surprise, a letter to her. It was in a white envelope, her name and address typed, with a redirect stuck over it in Kim-Ange’s flamboyant handwriting. She frowned. There was a crown printed on the envelope, and suddenly she realized what it was.

She put it down on the table incredibly quickly, as if it were hot, and stared at it.

The Crown Prosecution Service.

Instantly she could feel her every muscle tighten; her fingers curled. Her throat felt like it was closing over. She was suddenly gasping for breath. Every ridiculous claim she’d made the night before, about feeling better, about getting over things: it was all nonsense.