To cap it all off, Alex had announced he’d need a bed for exactly the same week when he came over for a cardiology conference — no subtle hints for Alex. And also, being Alex, he had kept William’s address, somehow known he was going to be in the vicinity with a hire car and conned him into driving him up to Scotland. And Angus was due for lunch any minute now too, because he wanted to meet ‘some of those Aussie blokes you’ve told me so much about’.

Her flat had two bedrooms and Susan’s was empty while she did a six-month exchange down at Guy’s Hospital in London and they had a blow-up mattress plus a sofa bed in the living room. Which meant there was plenty of choice for beds, but it didn’t answer the question at all . . .

. . . or even if there was a question because maybe William was just coming to call on her as the friend of long-shared letters, because after all he’d only called in to say ‘Hi’ and give her a kiss on the cheek when she was home last Christmas, making it clear that he and his mum were having Christmas dinner with the Lees. Were he and Tilly no longer together? Or maybe she couldn’t get away for this holiday . . .

Perhaps Alex too would expect nothing more than bed and breakfast and extremely good dinners too, though, being Alex, he probably would expect more, especially if he was staying a week and William only a night or maybe two — he hadn’t said. And Angus was . . . Angus. And. And.

Stop it, she told herself. You are the extremely competent Dr Kelly-O’Hara. You are worrying about nothing. Except, she thought, about my life.

She’d been offered another research fellowship the previous year — prestigious and fulfilling. She’d taken it, of course, continuing her work with Angus and Susan and the others. And when this fellowship ended, she was sure there’d be other offers, either there or in equally prestigious fascinating hospitals and laboratories.

But what did she want? Who was Scarlett Kelly-O’Hara? Or, more importantly, who did she want to be? A doctor, certainly. A scientist too, probably. But she had known that since she was ten.

Angus had been right when he’d found her sobbing with homesickness in the store cupboard that first week here. (She had never told anyone back home that.) This land did wriggle into your soul, the thousand greens, even the million variations on grey. The sound of a piper marching down the cobblestones in the night still brought her to tears — good tears, not the homesick kind.