Snowed In With My Stepbrother novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: First-Foot

The doors swung shut behind him.

Snow settled on the floorboards where they'd been open.

The kirk bell went on ringing across the road for a new year nobody wanted.

Finlay let go of my hand and went after his father.

I went after Finlay.

Outside, the car park was white and empty under the one lamp.

Alasdair's footprints went across it to the estate car, and the estate car was gone.

Finlay stood looking at the tracks.

"Where will he go?" I said.

"Where he always goes," said Finlay. "When it's bad."

He didn't have to say it.

We took the Land Rover down the glen track with the headlights full of snow.

The estate car was pulled up by the burn where my Panda had been two nights ago.

There was no smoke from the shack chimney.

There was no light under the door.

Finlay put his shoulder to the latch.

Inside it was black and freezing and smelled of cold ash and spilled wine.

My phone torch found Alasdair sitting on the log basket by the dead stove in his good tweed, with his back to the cot.

He had the dusty bottle of whisky off the shelf in both hands.

The seal on it was still unbroken.

"Close the door," he said. "You're letting the cold in."

Finlay closed it.

He knelt at the stove and laid the fire without speaking, and struck a match.

Kindling caught.

Orange light climbed the walls.

Alasdair turned the bottle in his hands.

"I bought this in Inverness the day I asked his mother," he said to me, not to Finlay. "Right here. I'd a ring in one pocket and this in the other. I thought we'd drink to it if she said yes."

"Did she?"

"She said yes before I'd got the ring out. Then she laughed at me for an hour for crying. We forgot all about the bottle." He looked at the shelf. "Thirty-four years it's sat there. I never could open it without her."

The stove ticked.

"Dad," said Finlay.

"Let me say it. I'll not manage it twice." Alasdair looked up at me. "Ailsa."

"You don't have to."

"I do. I was wrong, and I was wrong in front of everyone." His voice went. He waited for it. "I believed it of you because it was easier than believing it of her. Because then I'd not have to believe I'd been a fool for two and a half years."

"You weren't a fool. You were kind."

"It comes to the same thing when you're sixty-three." He wiped his face with the back of his big hand. "I'll say it in front of the glen. In the kirk on Sunday, from our pew, so every one of them hears it. You'll not be talked about in a shop again."

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