Early yesterday evening, when he’d started a new computer file outlining what kind of equipment he’d need to transport down from Gleann and in what order, and then had made lists of potential plants and supplies, he thought of Jen and her mosaic of windows always open on her laptop.

He’d expected to hear from her while he was gone. Hell, he’d expected to get a phone call an hour after he’d left her at that mausoleum of a house, once she saw what he’d been purposely forgetting. He could almost hear the questions, the concern, the disbelief. But the call never came.

Maybe she’d just gone in, grabbed the photo albums she wanted and then left. Ha! This was Jen, and he highly doubted that. She’d probably inventoried the whole place and had drawn up a schematic and schedule over what needed to be done to get the place cleaned out and sold. And that was okay, he told himself. He knew what he’d opened himself up to, and he’d deal with it when he got back. Maybe, he thought with a twinge, it was exactly what he needed.

Or maybe he could just leave the house shut tight and continue to pay Chris to take care of the yard.

The day of Da’s memorial, after Leith had illegally spread his ashes in various spots around Gleann and the valley, he’d locked up his childhood home and hadn’t opened it since. The following month Chris had come around to tell Leith the yard was beginning to look like shit, so Leith had sucked up the grief and drove down to the house, waving off Chris’s offer to help. At first he’d only meant to mow and clean up the overgrowth, but as soon as he started working, he roped off new flowerbeds and dug out the old vegetable garden. He’d stopped when it got too dark to see, and only then did he step back, hand on the shovel, and felt Da all around him.

That work—the kind of work they used to do together, before the pain had got to be too much for all that bending and Da had taken to sitting on the front porch and ordering his son around the yard—had kept Leith tethered to the warm memories of his father without drowning in them. Which was what would happen should he go inside that house again. It was easy to not feel sorrow when his body didn’t stop moving. It was helpful in keeping the sadness and loss at bay when he could step back and see the immediate fruits of his efforts—the kind of results Da would have loved.

Why was it necessary to go back into that house anyway? Why risk getting mowed down by an absence when he could stay outside and bask in the good memories? So he’d kept the door locked and had remained satisfied in his ability to keep his grief and acceptance at bay.

That is, until Jen had wanted to go inside, and he was reminded of all that he’d shut away. All that he’d never addressed. He’d sat there in his truck in the driveway, and it seemed like the house was ready to burst at its seams from all that he’d shoved inside and let fester over the past three years. No one could see those ghosts but him.

Except now Jen knew they existed. Now she would know that leaving Gleann was a lot more difficult than he’d been letting on, but that staying would be even worse.

He slowed his truck as Route 6 narrowed through the dramatic cut into the mountains, sheer, jagged cliffs rising three stories on both sides. The road curved here like a roller coaster, and when it spit him out into sloping, open land overlooking the valley lake, he knew he was five miles from Gleann. But something felt off. The sky was cloudless, the sun near blinding, and yet the valley looked dull, the water matte when it should have sparkled. To the east, where Gleann’s rooftops and lone stone church steeple poked between the trees, it looked like an extremely localized storm had focused on the town. Then he realized: That was no storm. It was a fire.

Pedal to the floor, he prayed his truck would stay on all four wheels as he sped around the curves toward the thick plumes of black smoke rising from what he guessed to be Hemmertex. The glass walls of the headquarters were obscured; he couldn’t see if that was indeed where the fire was centralized.

He drove until he could physically drive no more. Half the town of Gleann had filled up both lanes of Route 6, people clustered together in tight, murmuring groups, making no room to let him through. The other half of the town was lined up along the shoulder and against Loughlin’s cattle fence, staring across the fields and into the fairgrounds . . . where the barn serving as storage for the Highland Games was little more than a charred skeleton, its rib bones pointing angrily toward the sky.

“Shhhhit,” Leith said, throwing the truck in park and shutting it off. He got out, leaving the thing blocking the right lane. No one was going anywhere for quite a while. He pushed through the crowd, for once no one paying him any mind. He found an open spot on the fence and stared at the destruction.

Fire trucks from the larger community of Westbury, across the lake, had circled the blackened barn. All the water from putting out the fire had turned the fairgrounds into a mud pit, and violent tire tracks cross-hatched the grass. The air stung Leith’s lungs. Around him people coughed and held handkerchiefs and their shirtsleeves over their noses and mouths, but no one went home. Why would they? This was the most exciting thing to happen in Gleann in a hell of a long time, and misery and speculation would be conversation fodder for decades to come.

Though ninety percent of the stuff in that barn had seen its best days years ago, and the other ten percent was cheesy crap and as far from the Highland Games Da had described from back home, it was still Gleann’s, and they’d need it. Jen would need it to do what she’d come here to do.

As though his thinking of Jen had called her into the collective consciousness, he heard two women whispering behind him.

“Do you think she burned it down on purpose?” the first woman said.

“Maybe. Vera told Annabelle who told my Jack that she wants to change everything. And I mean everything.”

The first woman made a sound of disgust. “Don’t know why Sue brought her in. We could’ve just taken over, had it ourselves, the way we like it.”

Leith almost laughed. Jen burn down a barn? And yeah, the town probably could all gather in the middle of the destroyed fairgrounds and play some pipes and stuff, but the Scottish Society would pull support, no one who lived outside Gleann’s borders would attend, and then they’d be just a bunch of people standing around doing watered-down events that once upon a time had actually meant something. Jen wanted something bigger and better and she would work her ass off for that. To her, burning down a barn would be an insult to her prowess. To her, it would be taking the easy way out.

Where was she anyway? The fire was out and the firemen were picking through the smoking wreckage, but no one was dissipating. He had to say, despite his belief she had nothing to do with it, it would definitely look bad for her if she were the only person not here.

He rounded on the gossiping women. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Jen’s here to help.” He got the reaction he was looking for: fish mouths and huge, shocked eyes.

“But . . . but, look at her,” the first woman said, nudging her chin to the south, “sitting down over there, on her computer and phone, not even caring what’s going on.”

“And she’s not even doing anything to stop that trashy sister from coming between Owen and Melissa . . .”

That’s when Leith turned away. Let them say dumb, meaningless things.

There was a shift in the crowd, and then he saw her.

Jen had plopped down in the grass on the very edge of the gapers, her back to a fence post—and also the burned scene—her laptop open over her crossed legs, her phone pressed between ear and shoulder. Talking and typing simultaneously. In her pajamas and mismatched flip-flops. Her hair wound messily around a rubber band, and her glasses framed dark smudges underneath her makeup-less eyes.