Callum

She goes to Edinburgh on a Tuesday.

The morning train, watching the Borders give way to the Lothians through the window. The Pentlands to the west. The Firth opening east. And then Edinburgh doing what Edinburgh does, coming up from behind the ridge with the castle at the top of it, positioned where it always is not for anyone's benefit, just because it's always been there and intends to stay.

She goes to Stockbridge.

Callum answers before she's finished ringing the bell. He is in a different coat today, lighter, and she reads this as a decision about how to receive her rather than an unconscious choice. He looks at her the way he looked at her in the cottage as though looking at her is something to be careful with, the way you're careful with things that matter.

She says: "I said we'd have coffee on a Tuesday."

He says: "Come in."

The front room. The careful books. The one photograph on the mantelpiece. She looks at it this time, without hurrying past it. A woman, dark-haired, laughing at something off-camera. The laugh reorganises her whole face into something younger than the face's baseline.

She says: "Is that my mother."

"Yes."

She looks at it for a long time. She has photographs of Eilidh Ashcroft not many, her mother was not someone who sought cameras but this one she hasn't seen before. What she doesn't have anywhere in her collection is the laugh. Doesn't remember her mother laughing quite like that, with quite that reorganisation of the face, the complete unselfconsciousness of it. This photograph belongs to before she existed. To the time when her mother was young and unlost and laughing at something a man with a camera was doing.

She says: "What was she like. Before."

He says: "Brilliant." He says it as a primary quality, not a modifier. "Not in the showy way. In the way of someone who reads everything and remembers it and connects it to other things at a speed that looks like intuition. She would stop in the middle of a street because she'd thought of something she needed to write down. She filled notebooks."

Veira says: "I know."

He makes coffee. They sit. She asks questions and he answers all of them, without selecting for the ones that make him look better. He tells her about Eilidh's first year in Edinburgh, the lecture series that became the framework for her thinking, the pub off the Grassmarket where she used to go on Thursday nights to argue about literature with people she'd never met and never met again. He tells her about the night they met. About six months of falling in love in the way that happens when both people are surprised by it.

She says: "Did she know what you were."

"Not when we met. By the time she was pregnant, yes. Not everything not the Folklore's full structure. But what I was, yes. She received it the way she received most large information." He pauses. "She said: well, that explains some things. And then she asked me seventeen follow-up questions."

Something happens in Veira's face that she doesn't try to control. She says: "That sounds exactly right."

"It was exactly her."

They sit with this for a moment.

"Her last words to me," she says. "Don't let them be the first voice."

He looks at his hands. "I told her. The last time I saw her, seven years before she died I broke the protocol and made contact. I told her you would eventually need to know and that when that happened she should tell you herself before anyone else had the chance to frame it." He stops. "She said she would. And then she got ill before she had the chance. The last thing she could give you was the warning without the context." He stops again.

She says: "She gave me what she could."

"Yes."

"And the warning was enough. It kept me looking. It kept me from taking anyone else's version as definitive." She looks at him. "It worked."

He looks at her with the expression of a man who has been sitting in a Stockbridge front room for three years with a photograph on his mantelpiece and a daughter twenty minutes away, not knowing whether any of it was worth anything.

She says: "I don't know what this is. You and me. I don't know what it becomes or what I want it to become and I'm not going to tell you yet."

"I understand."

"But I came today. That's what I know right now."

"I know."

"And I'll come next Tuesday."

"I'll be here."

She finishes her coffee. She stands. She looks at the photograph one more time. The laugh, the reorganised face, the specific joy of a moment that was private until now.

She says: "She was good."

"She was the best person I ever knew."

"She raised me."

"I know."

"So she was also the best person I ever knew."

She goes to the door. The Stockbridge street is doing its midday thing the deli on the corner, a woman with a pushchair, two small dogs having a disagreement about direction. The city ordinary and continuous.

She walks toward the centre of it. She takes out her phone. She sends one message to five separate numbers: Ready. I'll call each of you with a time. Come to Edinburgh, not the cottage. There's something I need to tell all of you at once, and I need a table big enough for everyone.

She puts the phone away.

The castle does what the castle does, up on the ridge, and she walks toward it through the Edinburgh afternoon with the full weight of everything she knows and the decision she's been building for three weeks, and she is not afraid.

She is, for the first time in six months, specifically and entirely ready.