Snowed In With My Stepbrother novel · Chapter 12 of 24
Chapter 12: The Latch
I stood in my mother's dressing room with her threat in the air between us.
"I'm already sorry," I said. "I've been sorry for two and a half years. Goodnight, Mum."
I went to bed in the blue room and locked the papered door on my side, for once, because I wanted to be clear-headed in the morning.
Finlay didn't knock.
At ten on the twenty-ninth Elspeth wanted to go to the village shop.
She wanted a newspaper she never read and a quarter of pan drops.
"And I want to be seen," she said, "with you."
The housekeeper drove us down the loch road in the estate car.
The shop at Kinlochmorran was one room with a bell over the door, a post office counter and a freezer full of venison.
There were four women inside.
They stopped talking when I came in.
One of them looked at me and then very carefully at the shortbread.
The woman behind the counter said, "Morning, Mrs MacPherson," to Elspeth and nothing at all to me.
Elspeth leaned on her stick and looked round at all four of them in turn.
"This is my granddaughter, Ailsa," she said, loud enough for the street. "She painted the hill in the big house. She's the one who stood up for your grazing yesterday against my nephew's boy."
Nobody answered.
She turned to the counter. "I've known you since you were wetting yourself in the kirk nursery. If I hear in this shop one word about who my granddaughter keeps company with, I'll tell everyone in the glen who you kept company with in nineteen eighty-one."
The woman behind the counter turned the colour of the venison.
A woman by the freezer laughed out loud, then covered her mouth.
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