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)
The math is absolutely not mathing.
There is no version of it that does, even though I try every logical angle. Alasdair has a father who looks exactly like him. And a grandfather who looks like him. That could happen, couldn’t it?
I reach around and pick up the leather-bound notebook on the worktable. I flip it open to see her handwriting, see the first date in 1962.
I tried the salt circle with the rowan again. He came to the gate. He did not cross. I do not know why the wood does not work alone. I also don’t know why he keeps coming back.
—E.
I flip forward a few pages.
Catriona is missing. They came to my door. I told them what I could, and what I could not. I sat with my tea afterwards, watched the bay from the kitchen window, and waited for him to come to the rocks. But he didn’t. He hasn’t come for three nights. He knows I know it was him.
I flip forward. 1981. The year of the white horse painting.
I have tried the binding seventeen times. The thing my grandmother told my mother about, the piece of the horse hide. I cannot do it alone. He will not give it to me. The bargain only takes the form he can keep.
I flip to the last entries.
I am eighty-three, and he looks the same as he did when I was twenty-two. When I die, the bargain breaks. The next Galloway will have to do what I could not, or refuse him entirely. I will be the one who left her this. I will have to die with that.
The last entry is undated.
Iris will have to do what I could not. I am sorry to leave her this. I see no other way.
I close the notebook and stare numbly at the paintings.
Effie tried for sixty years to do something, some binding, and she failed at it.
Effie created a bargain with Alasdair.
Effie left me the cottage knowing all of this. She was unable to tell me outright—perhaps because I wouldn’t believe it until I lived here long enough—until I eventually came to know Alasdair.
I sit there for a long time.
When I get up, I am decidedly undecided. I know only there is one more person I have to talk to before the day is done; before my brain absolutely melts into goo.
I duck back through the doorway. I lock the secret room behind me, refuse to look at the jawbone that I know is still on the bed, then go downstairs. I get my keys from the kitchen counter where Alasdair left them.
I drive to the village.
Mhairi is at the till when I step inside her shop, the air inside warm and a little stale, smelling of tea, and butter, and lavender. It all seems so quaint, so normal and ordinary, and, for a moment, I think I’m being silly by coming here. That there’s no way I’m about to tell this shopkeeper I barely know that my neighbor seems to be immortal.
Even Mhairi seems so unassuming, keeping busy by sorting a stack of envelopes. She pauses her shuffling and looks up at me when I walk in.
She stares a beat longer than she needs to and squints, raising her chin. She doesn’t say anything, but I think, somehow, she already knows. She sets the envelopes down, then turns and puts the kettle on.
“Mhairi?” My voice is clear as I approach.
“Aye, hen. Cup of tea?”
“I’m good,” I tell her, raising my palm.
“You’ll be even better when you have tea. Sit down.”
There’s a single wooden chair by the cold radiator at the back of the shop, beside the rack of postcards the odd tourist or hill-walker buys—who apparently don’t care that they’re all yellowing at the edges. I sit down while Mhairi makes the tea. I know the stores back at home—least not the places I’ve lived in—would never offer tea to their customers as if they were old friends, but here it feels like a custom; part of the landscape. Besides, even though I really should just get some bread and a few things, I do have a fuckton of questions for her, and she’s more likely to answer them if I just do as she says and have tea.
She brings me a mug and a plate with a tablet of shortbread on it then pulls a stool over from behind the counter and sits across from me. She looks at me with her clear, hazel eyes for a long second before she speaks.
“Let’s cut the idle chitchat, shall we?”
I nearly choke on my biscuit. Straight to the point, this one. I hope that comes in abundance today.
“You’ve been over there,” she states.
I don’t have to ask her to clarify where “there” is.
“You’ve gotten to…know him,” she adds with a glint in her eye. I don’t want her to clarify what that means either.