a look at you.’
Bethan stood up, straightening her navy trouser suit and making sure her cream blouse was crease-free. ‘Will I do?’
‘He’d be a dunderheid to turn you down, lass.’
‘Good.’ She checked her watch. ‘I’ll be late. Will you be all right?’
‘’Course I will. I’ve looked after myself for nearly twenty years—I think I can probably manage the next hour or so. Besides, I’ve had a few orders come in for the shop, so I need to get those bagged up.’
‘Okay. Well...wish me luck?’
‘Good luck, lassie.’
Bethan gave her a quick hug and one last look that she hoped conveyed that everything would be all right, and then she picked up her briefcase and headed out of the door.
Nanna wasn’t the only one who was doubtful about expecting a Brodie to take her on. She’d probably been the most surprised when a letter had arrived, inviting her for an interview with a Dr Cameron Brodie. But the past was the past and she herself had no argument with the Brodies. Clearly Dr Cameron Brodie didn’t have a grudge either, or she wouldn’t have been invited for the interview.
Nanna’s part-time job—dying her own rare wool skeins to sell in an online shop—barely covered the bills, and in the last three months sales hadn’t been good. They’d struggled—and struggled hard. But now, with Grace having started school full-time, Bethan had become free to get herself a proper job again.
She’d really missed work. She’d come home to start their lives afresh, and nothing could beat being a mother, but her whole heart had always wanted to care for others. There was something about being a GP that spoke to her. The way you could build a relationship with patients over years, so they wouldn’t be strangers. It was a privilege to be a friend as well as a doctor, and although sometimes that was a difficult line to walk she did it anyway.
Helping people—healing them, curing them of their ailments—was a magical thing and something that she treasured. But the most she’d done over the last few years with Grace had been to patch scuffed knees, wipe snotty noses and nurse Grace through a particularly scratchy episode of chicken pox. The closest she’d got to medication was calamine lotion.
And what she’d been through prior to that, with Ashley, that had been... Well, I don’t regret a day of that.
But he’d not been a patient, nor a friend. He’d been her husband. Grace’s father. Their relationship had been all-consuming in that last year, and she’d been bereft when he’d died. Quite unable to believe that she would still be able to get up and carry on each day without him.
But I did. For Grace.
She’d made the decision to move away from Cornwall three years afterwards, and coming back to Gilloch—to Nanna—had seemed the right thing. Mhairi was alone, too. She knew what the pain of losing a husband—and, sadly, a child—felt like. They were comrades in grief to start with.
But that was the past and now the future beckoned—and with it a fresh sense of purpose for Bethan. She felt it in her bones. This job—this interview—was the way forward for all of them.
As she strode through the streets of Gilloch, her head high and the strong breeze blowing her hair from her shoulders, she remembered Ashley’s last words—‘You’ll go on without me and you’ll be absolutely fine.’
She’d doubted it back then. That she would get through life without him. But time, as they said, was a great healer, and now she often found herself yearning for that kind of closeness again.
But she was absolutely sure—no matter how good-looking Dr Cameron Brodie was—that she would keep her work relationships on a different level from her personal ones.
* * *
Dr Cameron Brodie swallowed the tablets with a glass of water and hoped that his headache would pass. He’d woken with it pounding away in his skull and it had been a real struggle to open his eyes to the bright light of the early morning, to get up and get dressed to face the day. If it hadn’t been for Rosie then he would no doubt have pulled the quilt over his head and gone back to sleep.
But it wasn’t just Rosie. He had someone to interview today. Someone he hoped would take his place permanently at the Gilloch surgery. Not that she would realise that at first. He’d advertised it as a year’s post. Twelve months—start to finish. But he knew that before those twelve months were up the people he left behind would have to rearrange their aspirations.
He had a ticking time bomb in his head. An inoperable glioma. And Dr Bethan Monroe had been the only applicant for the post. Beggars can’t be choosers. Wasn’t that what they said?
He made it to the surgery and opened up, having driven there wearing the strongest pair of sunglasses he owned. Sometimes in the early mornings the sunlight in Scotland could be so bright, so fierce, it would make your eyes water. The sun so low in the sky, its light reflecting off the wet road, was almost blinding.
The headache would ease soon. He knew that. The tablets his consultant had prescribed were excellent at doing their job.
And they allowed him to do his.
For a little while longer anyway.
He hoped that this Bethan character was a strong applicant. Her CV was impressive.
By all accounts in her last post she had started up a support group for people with anxiety and panic attacks. Somewhere for them to get together and share stories and ideas in the hope that they could learn that they were not alone in the fight. She had also put together a volunteer ‘buddy system’, for older people who were lonely to be paired up with a younger person who could be a friend and check in on them whenever it was needed.
Her references were glowing. Her previous colleagues and partners all sang her praises and had been sad to see her go. For ‘personal reasons’, whatever that meant.
He checked the time. If she was as punctual as she said she was in her CV, no doubt she would be arriving in the next ten minutes.
There was a small mirror above the sink in his room, and he quickly checked his reflection to make sure that he didn’t look too rough—that there was some colour in his normally pale cheeks. That was the problem with being a redhead—he had such pale skin that when he was actually sick he looked deathly.
He rubbed his jawline, ruffling the short red bristles, and figured he’d have to do. There were some dark shadows beneath his eyes, but there was nothing he could do about those.
Cameron sat down in his chair and his gaze fell upon the one small picture of his daughter Rosie which he allowed on his desk. In it she sat on a beach, with the sun setting behind her and her long red hair over one shoulder as she smiled at him behind the camera. She’d put a flower behind her ear and begged him to take a picture.
She’d looked so much like her mother at that moment he’d almost been unable to do so. For a moment it had been as if Holly was looking back at him, smiling. She had simply taken his breath away that day. He had almost put the camera down.
‘Daddy! Take my picture!’
He
