Page 6 of A Scot in the Storm
The cottage wasa ten-minute walk from the museum, down a narrow lane that ran parallel to the coast. One bedroom. A kitchen-slash-living-room. A bathroom with a shower that produced water in two temperatures: scalding and arctic. The estate agent had described it ascosy,which Abigail had learned was code fortiny.
But it was clean, it was hers for the next six months, and the window above the kitchen sink looked out over the sea, which she had to admit was worth the cramped space.
It took her twenty minutes to unpack. She didn’t own much. Clothes. Books. Her laptop. A framed photo of her and Sam at the Grand Canyon the summer before the diagnosis, both of them sunburned and grinning and not yet knowing. She set it on the nightstand and plugged in her phone to charge.
At eight o’clock, she made a simple pasta with the groceries she’d picked up in Fraserburgh and ate standing at the kitchen counter, looking out at the sea. The light was fading slowly this far north, a long, drawn-out twilight that turned the water from grey to silver to something almost luminous.
She called Sam.
“Abs!” He sounded like he was eating. “How’s the castle?”
“It’s a museum.”
“Same thing. Is it haunted?”
“It’s not haunted, Sam.”
“Every castle in Scotland is haunted. I saw a documentary.”
“You watched a YouTube video.”
“Same thing.” She heard him chewing. “Seriously, though. Are you okay?”
She leaned against the counter. “I’m fine. It’s a good project.”
There was a pause. Sam was bad at many things. Budgeting, laundry, remembering anyone’s birthday including his own, but he’d always been good at hearing what she didn’t say. The two of them had been each other’s only family for a long time. He’d learned to read the small silences in her voice the way she’d learned to read his.
“It sucks, Abs. What they did to you sucks.”
“I know.”
“You were right about the brooch. Everyone who actually read the paper knows you were right.”
“Being right and having a job aren’t the same thing.”
“No, but—” He exhaled.
“You always land on your feet. Remember when you lost the fellowship in grad school? You found three freelance projects in a week.”
“I remember eating ramen for four months.”
“Yeah, but fancy ramen. From the place on the corner with the orange cat in the window.”
The laugh that broke free surprised her. She hadn’t laughed in weeks.
She almost asked, had the question already arranged in her mouth,how did the labs come back, what did Dr. Mitra say, are they putting you back on anything,but she swallowed it. If he wanted to tell her, he would. He’d made that rule, not her.When I want to talk about it, I’ll talk about it. Until then, I’m still your brother, not a chart.
So instead she said, “Tell me about the waves.”
He laughed. “Oh man, Abs, it was clean. Morro was firing, like shoulder-high and glassy, and I paddled into this left that just kept going. Rode it all the way to the jetty. Could’ve kept riding it to Hawaii.”
She closed her eyes. She could see him, smaller than he used to be, his sun-bleached hair growing back in a darker color, his feet on the board like he’d been born there. Riding every wave the Pacific threw at him because no one could promise him another swell.
That was the thing she couldn’t let herself look at directly. Sam had decided, somewhere between the first diagnosis and the relapse, that he wasn’t going to die having been careful. He was going to live every wave like it was the last.
And because he was Sam, he was happy doing it. That was the worst part.
“I miss you,” she said.
