and a half weeks, he told himself as he unlocked the car and held the door for her, and it would all be over and she’d be gone, and everything would get back to normal.
For some reason, that didn’t feel comforting.
The road to Ardnashiel was painfully familiar to Maisie, and they travelled it in a tense and brittle silence.
The first time she’d driven it with Rob all those years ago, it had felt very different. They’d been laughing and holding hands as he drove, their fingers linked on his thigh, and he’d been telling her all about it, about the huge, sprawling estate his father had inherited ten years before from an uncle.
He loved it, he’d told her. He’d loved it as a child, coming up with his parents to visit his widowed uncle, not realising at first that one day it would be his, and he was looking forward to showing it to her. ‘Since it’s going to be mine. Not for years and years, though,’ he’d added, laughing. ‘I’m not ready to bury myself up here in the wilderness yet, by a long way, but one day, I suppose, the time will come.’
That day had come sooner than he’d imagined, when his father had died in a shooting accident eight years ago and he’d left London and moved up here for good. She’d never been back, though, not since the day she’d left and vowed never to return.
The road hadn’t changed at all since then, she thought, taking it in as her heart knotted ever tighter in her chest. A quiet, winding road that ran between lush green fields with fat cattle grazing contentedly. It was calm, bucolic, and it should have been beautiful, but it was coloured by association. The last time she’d travelled it, she’d been in a taxi, leaving it behind, and part of her was still the lonely, desperate young woman that she had been then.
He reached a junction and turned onto a narrow switchback of a road that clung in the gap between the edge of a loch and the wall of rock where the land met the water. It was an appalling road, and yet the fact that it existed at all in such a tight space was a miracle of engineering in itself.
The loch turned into a river, then the road widened as the land levelled out into a flat bowl around the harbour mouth, houses clustered along its walls, fringing the sea and running up towards the hills, and then beyond the small community, set up on its own on a rocky outcrop above the beach, was Ardnashiel Castle.
Built of stone, grey and forbidding, even with the sun shining on it there was a look of menace about it that chilled Maisie to the bone.
Just as it was meant to, really, since it had been built as a fort, but an ancestor had extended it two hundred years ago, creating a more civilised living area and carving gardens out of the woodland that had encroached on it. He’d added little turrets with tops like witches’ hats, and made the windows bigger, and the first time she’d seen it she’d thought it was straight out of a fairy-tale, but then things had changed. It had ceased to be a safe haven and begun to feel like a prison, and looking at it now brought the feelings of suffocation crashing back.
And maybe Rob realised it because, as they crossed the stone bridge and drew up in the stable- yard by the coach-house, he glanced across at her for the first time since they’d left the café and sighed.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said quietly. ‘I realise it’s not your fault you don’t know Alec, but give him a chance. Please. And my mother. I know you didn’t always see eye to eye, but she’s worried about seeing you again, worried you’ll still dislike her.’
‘I didn’t dislike her, Rob,’ she corrected him quietly. ‘She disliked me. And I’m sorry if you felt I was being unfair to Alec. I will give him a chance, of course I will. I’ve always liked what I’ve seen of him, but—I’m just worried for Jenni, Rob. She’s my little girl, and I’d hate to see her make a mistake.’
‘It’s not a mistake—and she’s my little girl too, remember,’ he said with a twisted smile that cut her to the heart. ‘Just because she lived with you doesn’t mean I didn’t love her every bit as much as you did. And I know you feel I’ve stolen her from you, but she feels at home here.’
She opened her mouth to argue, to say of course she didn’t feel that, she knew he hadn’t stolen her, but then shut it again, because she did feel like that, did feel that he’d stolen not only her daughter but also her wedding, all the planning and girly excitement she’d seen so often in other young brides and their mothers, the tears and the tantrums and the laughter.
Which was ridiculous, because she was here now, for exactly that, and she would be here for as long as her daughter needed her.
‘Rob, it’s fine. Let’s just move on, can we?’ she said, and then the car door was snatched from her hand and Jenni was hurling herself into the car and hugging her, sitting on the sill and cupping her face, staring at her searchingly.
‘Are you all right? I know you didn’t want to come, but—’
‘I’m fine,’ she said softly, and gathering Jenni into her arms she hugged her hard. ‘It’s fine. And it’s going to be loads of fun. Come on, let’s go inside and we can start planning!’
‘Brilliant, I can’t wait. Here, look, my ring!’
She held her hand out, eyes sparkling, face alight with love and happiness, and Maisie looked at the ring, a simple diamond in a white gold band, nothing flashy but perfectly suited to her uncomplicated and slender daughter, and she smiled.
‘It’s lovely. Did he choose it?’
She giggled mischievously. ‘I might have hinted a little,’ she confessed, and Rob snorted.
‘Only slightly,’ he said. He was out of the car, taking her bags out of the boot by the time she’d disentangled herself from their daughter and climbed out, and she scraped her windswept hair back out of her eyes and reached for her camera.
Rob was there first. ‘I’ve got it. You go on in with Jenni, I’ll put this lot in your room.’
And she was led inside, Jenni’s arm round her waist, and it was only as they went in that she realised things had changed.
The house was warm, for a start. Warm and bright and welcoming. It had never felt like that, not even in the summer, the year she’d had Jenni. And Jenni had taken her in through the front door, instead of round the side and in through the kitchen, the way Rob had always taken her in.
Through the tradesmen’s entrance?
She was being ridiculous. He’d treated her as a member of the family instead of a visitor, but Jenni—Jenni was treating her as if she was special, a treasured and valued guest, ushering her in, smiling and laughing and hugging her, and as she led her into the drawing room, so familiar and yet so different, Helen Mackenzie got to her feet and came towards them. Older, stiffer, but still beautiful, still the elegant, dignified and aloof woman she’d always been.
‘Maisie—welcome back,’ she said softly, and held out her hand.
Maisie shook it, glad she hadn’t kissed her or embraced her. It would have felt wrong after all the bitterness of the past, and the formal, impersonal contact was enough for now. More than enough. She found a smile and wished she wasn’t wearing jeans and had had time to drag a brush through her hair.
‘Thank you, Mrs Mackenzie,’ she said politely, and then foundered, but it didn’t matter.
Rob’s mother simply
