Jen suddenly felt guilty for being in there. She backed out, closing the door against the very personal nature of the place, and leaned against the wall. Leith had let her into the house to get the photo albums, nothing more. Yet . . . he had to have known she’d take a look around—that she’d see what she’d just seen—and realize the extent of his grief. The grief he’d been hiding so well for three years. He had to have known she’d realize he’d been lying about getting over losing his dad. That he still felt lost.
He trusted her enough to show her this, trusted her with his pain. Hell, maybe he wanted to show her. Maybe this was his way of asking for help.
Or maybe, to him, this had been a necessary casualty. Maybe his only intention had been to help her do her job with the games—like he had back in the Kafe with the townspeople—and he’d cut himself open to do it. He’d taken an invisible knife, carved out his despair and heartbreak, and displayed it. For her.
Muscles didn’t have anything to do with strength. If she could, she would absorb his pain and relieve him of all that pressure of putting on a good, healed face for everyone.
She pushed off the wall and went back to the hutch in the den. Sunlight streamed in the front window now, the air clear of dust, so she easily found the latch and opened the hutch doors. Inside, the shelves were stacked with disorganized photo albums that might have made Bobbie “Roberts” twitch.
Jen ran her fingers down the spines of the thick, relatively new albums, the ones from the last thirty years, the ones dedicated to Leith’s life. Placed on its own shelf was one labeled “Margaux MacDougall,” and if ever a single, earthly item gave off a saintly vibe, it was that. Though Jen had never seen a picture of Leith’s mom, who’d died when he was just a baby, cracking open that album seemed far too personal, far too invasive.
She touched the albums near the bottom, where Leith had said the ones she was looking for would be. No, no, no, no. Ah, there.
The documentation of the elder MacDougall’s life in Scotland was in big, thick treasuries made of actual leather. The two burgundy covers had cracked and dried at the edges, their spines brittle. They didn’t have labels and they didn’t need them.
Because the concrete porch was where Mr. MacDougall had showed her and Leith these books long ago, that was where she took them now. Blinking hard in the bright sunlight, she gingerly sat on the rickety wood bench, hoping it wouldn’t splinter and crack under her weight. It held, and she flipped open the first album.
Pages and pages of mustard-yellow photos and paper, of blurred, black-and-white children running around Highland meadows, dark skies billowing overhead. She could have stayed there all day, flipping through the past of a man she dearly missed, but there was a purpose to this, and unfortunately it wasn’t nostalgia.
The second album was almost entirely dedicated to Mr. MacDougall’s teens and early twenties, namely, his throwing days in the old country. Nibbled-edge fliers for the Fort William and Dufftown and Aberdeen Highland Games, their words typed on, yes, a typewriter. Line drawings of heavily muscled athletes wielding competition stones and cabers and hammers. Competitors’ listings, with MacDougall’s name circled in pencil. Ribbons of all places stuffed into the cracks, their adhesive long since gone. Swatches of tartans, their clans unknown to her. A single pressed flower.
Photos upon photos of a young MacDougalclass="underline" throwing, smiling, posing with other men in kilts, standing at attention as the massed bands strolled past.
Jen studied each photo with an eagle eye, calling back to mind Mr. MacDougall’s accented voice as he’d told each scene’s story—and even more stories from off-camera. She paid attention to the backgrounds, to the setting and atmosphere. She picked out details and let her mind trail off to brainstorm possibilities. Setting the album to the side, she took out her laptop and let her fingers fly, recording all her random, scattered ideas. She’d make sense of the lists later.
A million new pieces clicked into place. Her brain buzzed with the possibilities.
Gleann had been trying to compete with the bigger, more well-known games across the state, going for showy but ending up cartoonish and laughable. She lifted her face to the sun and pictured the beautiful town of Gleann, built by Scottish hands and inhabited by people with deep roots. That’s what their games had lost: that link to their history. The fearless Scottishness of the event.
She was going to get that back, and she held the key to success in her hands.
Chapter
10
Five hours on the road, and Leith’s eyelids felt coated in lead and sandpaper. He entered the lake valley just as the sun lifted itself above the eastern horizon and painted the hills that hid Gleann from the rest of the world.
He’d spent almost three nights down in Connecticut. Two full days of walking around the Carriage’s new estate with Rory, taking measurements and soil samples, sketching, and tossing ideas back and forth with her, then back to his motel at night to fire up the computer design programs he hadn’t used in months. This job was everything he’d wanted and more. Dream landscape with incredible topsoil, dream client who wanted to give him his freedom, new dream location. The adrenaline rising out of the potential—out of what could possibly signal his future—pumped through his system.
Early yesterday evening, when he’d started a new computer file outlining what kind of equipment he’d need to transport down from Gleann and in what order, and then had made lists of potential plants and supplies, he thought of Jen and her mosaic of windows always open on her laptop.
He’d expected to hear from her while he was gone. Hell, he’d expected to get a phone call an hour after he’d left her at that mausoleum of a house, once she saw what he’d been purposely forgetting. He could almost hear the questions, the concern, the disbelief. But the call never came.
Maybe she’d just gone in, grabbed the photo albums she wanted and then left. Ha! This was Jen, and he highly doubted that. She’d probably inventoried the whole place and had drawn up a schematic and schedule over what needed to be done to get the place cleaned out and sold. And that was okay, he told himself. He knew what he’d opened himself up to, and he’d deal with it when he got back. Maybe, he thought with a twinge, it was exactly what he needed.
Or maybe he could just leave the house shut tight and continue to pay Chris to take care of the yard.
The day of Da’s memorial, after Leith had illegally spread his ashes in various spots around Gleann and the valley, he’d locked up his childhood home and hadn’t opened it since. The following month Chris had come around to tell Leith the yard was beginning to look like shit, so Leith had sucked up the grief and drove down to the house, waving off Chris’s offer to help. At first he’d only meant to mow and clean up the overgrowth, but as soon as he started working, he roped off new flowerbeds and dug out the old vegetable garden. He’d stopped when it got too dark to see, and only then did he step back, hand on the shovel, and felt Da all around him.
That work—the kind of work they used to do together, before the pain had got to be too much for all that bending and Da had taken to sitting on the front porch and ordering his son around the yard—had kept Leith tethered to the warm memories of his father without drowning in them. Which was what would happen should he go inside that house again. It was easy to not feel sorrow when his body didn’t stop moving. It was helpful in keeping the sadness and loss at bay when he could step back and see the immediate fruits of his efforts—the kind of results Da would have loved.