“Come on noo, lass, you’ve made it!” he said encouragingly.

Lissa stared at him; she didn’t understand a word. The driver nodded toward the door, and Lissa jumped up and sidled past him. Was this it? She lugged her heavy bag and jumped down the steps, ignoring the driver offering to take her case and not remembering to thank him either, which didn’t change Iain’s idea of English people one iota, frankly.

But Lissa was too nervous to care. She tried to shake herself. She never used to be like this! She’d traveled in South America one summer when she’d been a nursing student, traveled through strange countries, drunk tequila and danced in strange bars in strange neighborhoods. What had happened to that girl? In one terrible moment she had gone. In the scheme of things, of course, she was the lucky one. She felt guilty that she even felt bad, when she had lost nothing and others had lost everything.

But still. She missed that girl. Here she was in a little village in a perfectly safe environment, and the hand gripping her rolling suitcase was shaking.

LISSA MADE IT to the park bench. The sun was out, but the wind felt incredibly cold. You never really noticed the wind in London, except when you crossed the Thames. The Millennium Bridge, a short walk from the nurses’ quarters, was always breezy.

Here on Kirrinfief’s pretty, open cobbled square, she could feel the full force of its chill and pulled her new puffer jacket closer around her. The houses were higgledy-piggledy, in gray stone, with doors that led right out onto the pavement; there wasn’t a straight roof to be found. Smoke puffed out of several chimneys. There was a cozy old pub on the corner, with hanging baskets outside, and a bright red-painted grocers with mops and brooms propped up against the window. A pale blue bus was parked in the corner, selling books. Lissa tried to imagine sitting and reading a book again. It seemed incredibly unlikely, managing to slow her brain down, managing to concentrate for long enough without breaking the spell. And she couldn’t read anything triggering or upsetting . . .

Something else lost.

She looked at her watch. The local GP was supposed to be meeting her, talking her through the job. Bit of a jack-of-all-trades, by the sound of things, provisions being so patchy and far apart. In London it sometimes felt like there was a hospital every hundred yards. It didn’t seem like that was the case here.