Chapter 10: Scotland
The roses looked better once I cut them back.
It took me most of a Saturday afternoon, and by the end my hands were scratched from the thorns and my back ached, but when I stood at the kitchen window and looked out at them — shaped properly now, the dead wood gone, the new growth visible — I felt something I hadn't felt in a long time.
Not happiness exactly.
Something quieter.
The satisfaction of a thing restored.
Daniel and Tiffany came for Sunday dinner the following week.
It was the third Sunday in a row.
We had established it without formally establishing it — Daniel had come the first time alone, then the second time with Tiffany, and by the third time it had simply become the arrangement.
Tiffany had started helping in the kitchen.
Not performatively — she didn't make a show of it.
She just came in and asked where things were, and I told her, and we worked alongside each other in a comfortable quiet that neither of us tried to fill with too much conversation.
That Sunday, while Daniel was setting the table, she looked up from the salad she was making and said, "Can I ask you something?"
"Yes."
"The Scotland trip.
The one you canceled." She kept her eyes on what she was doing.
"Is it something you still want to do?"
I thought about Thomas's notebook on the shelf.
The soft green cover.
The handwriting inside, listing places I had never seen.
"Yes," I said.
"Then you should go." She said it simply, without ceremony.
"You should go this year, before another reason not to appears."
I looked at her.
"I'm not saying it fixes anything," she said.
"I know it doesn't.
I just — " She set down the salad tongs.
"He wrote those places down because he wanted you to see them.
That doesn't expire."
I didn't say anything for a moment.
"No," I said finally.
"It doesn't."
Carol booked the flights in March.
Two weeks in Scotland, starting in Edinburgh and moving north along the route Thomas had mapped in his small green notebook.
She had insisted on coming, which I had not expected and had not argued against.
We left on a Tuesday morning in April.
I carried the notebook in my coat pocket.
Not in my bag — in my pocket, where I could feel it.
The first place Thomas had written down was a village on the coast of Fife, a small harbor town with a bakery and a narrow street that ran down to the water.
We arrived on the second day, in the late afternoon, when the light was coming across the sea at a low angle and turning everything gold.
Carol went into the bakery.
I walked down to the harbor and stood at the edge of the water.
I took out the notebook.
I opened it to the first page.
Thomas had written the name of the village at the top, and beneath it, in his careful hand: *Margaret will love this one.*
I stood there for a long time.
The water moved against the harbor wall.
A fishing boat came in slowly, its engine a low rumble in the quiet.
I didn't cry.
I had expected to, but I didn't.
What I felt was something different — a kind of presence, as though the distance between here and then had briefly closed.
As though he had known I would stand in this exact spot and had left a note for me here, tucked inside a green notebook, waiting.
Carol came out of the bakery with two paper bags and found me at the water's edge.
"Well?" she said.
I closed the notebook and put it back in my pocket.
"He was right," I said.
"I love it."
She handed me one of the bags.
We sat on a bench overlooking the harbor and ate our pastries while the light faded and the fishing boat tied up at the dock and a man in a yellow jacket called something to someone onshore and the someone called back.
Ordinary life, going on.
The way it does.
On the last night of the trip, I called Daniel from the hotel room.
It was late — past ten — but he answered on the second ring.
"How is it?" he asked.
"It's everything he said it would be."
A pause on the line.
"I'm glad, Mom."
"How are you and Tiffany?"
"We're okay.
Better than okay, I think.
The counselor says we're making real progress." A beat.
"She's been thinking about you.
She'll want to hear everything when you're back."
"Tell her I'll bring her something from Edinburgh."
"She'll like that."
I sat on the edge of the hotel bed after I hung up.
The room was small and clean and smelled faintly of the sea.
Through the window the sky was still holding a thin line of light along the horizon, the way Scottish skies do in spring — reluctant to go fully dark.
I thought about the filing cabinet at home, with the folder behind Thomas's insurance papers.
I thought about Richard Hartley's four-sentence letter and the cream paper it was written on.
I thought about a ballroom and a sl@p and a phone call to a wedding coordinator and a parking lot and a kitchen table and a solicitor's office and a Sunday dinner and a harbor in Fife.
I thought about Thomas writing *Margaret will love this one* in his careful hand, not knowing when I would read it, only knowing that I would.
I turned off the bedside lamp.
Outside, the last of the light faded from the horizon.
I had loved it.
Every step of it.
And somehow, even the hard parts had led me here.
---
Some things we give out of love — and some people take advantage of that.
But what's taken from us doesn't always stay gone.
May you like
Have you ever sacrificed something for family and had to fight to reclaim your own dignity?
Share your story in the comments — someone reading this needs to know they're not alone.
