Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
And then I didn’t see her again. My dad died when I was eighteen, and the trips stopped; Effie sent a card the year I got married and, strangely enough, last year when I got divorced, but that was as much contact we’d had (to be clear, it wasn’t a “Congrats on your divorce” card, it was more of a vague postcard from Scotland that said she was thinking of me and hoped I was well). When the email came from her solicitor, I had to think about it for a moment. Effie Galloway. The cottage was to be left to me and me alone, but only if certain conditions were met.
The conditions were thus: I had to live there for one year. Continuously, with brief allowances for travel, properly notified to the executor. At the end of the year the property would be mine along with what little estate she left.
It took me forty-eight hours to say yes.
I had many different reasons for agreeing to it. The version I told my brother Andrew is that I needed somewhere to land after the divorce, which was true, albeit simple-sounding. The version I told his wife—and my best friend Maddie— at her kitchen table at two in the morning the night before I flew out, was the longer one. I have been sleeping in other people’s houses for a year. I have not had a place that was mine since I moved out of the house I shared with Ryan. My freelance work is shrinking faster than I can keep up with thank you, shitty AI art. My body hurts most days and the cold months are coming—Chicago cold is different from Scotland cold, as far as I’ve heard—and Andrew and Maddie’s basement has done its job for as long as anyone could expect, and I needed to be somewhere where my exhaustion and failures weren’t taking up space in someone else’s life.
And, although I didn’t say this part out loud, even to Maddie, Effie chose me. Out of every Galloway in her bloodline, that woman I met once when I was twelve put my name in her will. I have no idea why. I don’t know what she saw in me, especially at such a young age, or what she remembered of me, or what had made her decide. But she did, and the cottage is the only thing in my life right now that has been offered rather than survived, so I was not going to say no to it.
Though, to be honest, the fact that there are conditions in place—such as staying here for one year—is more than a little strange. It reminds me of those old spooky shows where the tenant has to survive a night in a haunted house in order to inherit it. Luckily, I’m a little strange and spooky myself, and even though I’ve only been here four days, as far as I can tell the cottage isn’t haunted. It’s just a little drafty, and the things scratching at the windows at night are just the climbing roses moving in the ever-present breeze. I think.
So here I am. Four days into the rest of my life and looking at a stranger’s dick across a loch in Wester Ross.
My therapist would have something to say about all of this, but I don’t have to see her for at least a year, so…
The cottage is called Tigh-na-Mara, House by the Sea in Gaelic, which I have been pronouncing wrong every time I’ve tried to say it out loud. It sits low on a rocky spit on the south shore of Loch Torridon, looking west across a small bay to a second spit where the castle crouches half-hidden behind its own outcrops. The road in is a single-track branch off the A896 that branches off again onto this small peninsula, gives up halfway and turns to gravel, then to ruts.
The nearest village is Shieldaig, cute as a button, in one direction, and the other direction is Torridon Village. In between is the castle-like Torridon Hotel which is maybe the closest bastion of civilization to me and that’s still a good fifteen minutes away by car. Effie chose her remoteness on purpose. So did the three Galloway women before her. I’m starting to suspect this is a Galloway thing.
Despite the remoteness, however, the cottage has everything a newly-divorced gal could need. There’s a quaint kitchen with a wood-burning stove, open shelving piled high with wooden bowls and mismatching porcelain mugs and a deep stone sink. Paintings of the sea and ships give it a nautical flair—every now and then there’s a portrait of flowers that gives me the itch to paint, and the worn oak table and two chairs is exactly the place to do that.
Then there is a sitting room with two cushy armchairs, a fireplace, and a window that faces the water with gauzy curtains that billow in dramatically. A cold-as-hell-even-with-the-heat-blaring bathroom has both a soaking tub and a tiny shower with plumbing that shakes and shimmies when you use it. A small guest bedroom upstairs under the eaves, low-beamed, where I have already hit my head twice, and a locked closet that I don’t have a key for. The main bedroom is downstairs. A little sparse, with just the bed—a very comfortable queen, thank you, Effie!—, a side table, and an ornately-carved wardrobe in the corner that looks like a man standing in the middle of the night, but it’s workable. It just needs some art on the walls. I can tell there were a few paintings there at one point thanks to their outlines, but, for whatever reason, Effie removed them before she died.