She just wished it could be easier. Maybe it would be if she were more like her brothers and sister. They never seemed to cause their parents any headaches, or her mother to rub her temples as often as she did around Elle. She knew of course they had given her parents their fair share of grief, but they’d never locked horns over anything major like school or their career paths. They all somehow knew what they wanted to do and got the grades to get there.

Elle, on the other hand, had known she was a problem the first time she saw her mother have a shot of whisky before they left the house for parent–teacher night, just to brace herself.

Phrases like, ‘Elle needs to apply herself’, and ‘With a little more concentration …’, were the usual conversation starters, before teachers would go on to ask about her siblings and how they were doing. The only bright part of the evenings came when they sat down with Elle’s art teacher and the phrases were more like, ‘Elle has a creative flare’, and ‘Elle’s work has been exceptional’, but by then her parents had already started to silently question where they’d gone so wrong with kid number three, and ‘Only getting good grades in art isn’t going to get you into university …’ would be the start of the lecture she would hear on the drive home.

With an irritated sigh, she pushed away her frustration. What she needed was a night with her best friend and some Rose time to put things back in perspective. She just had the rest of the day to get through first.

She kept the list in the top drawer of the buffet in the lounge room. It was in a gorgeous fabric-covered notebook Gran had given Elle one Christmas as a child, and they had begun to record all the things they wanted to do together. Elle hadn’t looked at it in a long while.

Elle smiled as she flipped through the pages then hesitated, her smile slipping slightly as she read a new entry that hadn’t been there the last time she’d looked through the book. It was written in her gran’s beautifully slanted handwriting.

Find Stormeil Castle. My final resting place.

When Gran had asked Elle to take her ashes back to Scotland, Elle had assumed she wanted to be placed with her family, in Portsoy, the little fishing village where Gran had grown up.

‘Why would you want to be left there?’ she wondered aloud.

Because that was my ancestral home.

‘But it’s a ruin,’ Elle said, no longer surprised to hear her gran’s voice. ‘We don’t even know exactly where it is.’