“What will you do instead? Where will you go when this place is sold?” Tyler eased off his boots and Emily smiled when she saw that, even as a grown man, he still wore mismatched socks.

“The one decent piece of advice my dad ever gave me was ‘don’t quit until you’re done.’”

“I don’t un…” Emily’s tongue got trapped trying to sound out the letter “d” and she pushed herself up from her chair, strode back into the kitchen and out to the garden, where she stared up at the sky. She stood, head tilted back as she scanned the various shades of blue, picked out a couple of swallows that were on the hunt for their supper and followed them until they dipped and turned too far for her to see. She heard Tyler come up behind her, felt him take a breath, and could imagine him deciding whether or not to reach out and place a hand on her shoulder.

“Don’t let this…quest, or whatever you want to call it, decide. Make sure you decide when to stop.”

He was right, but that didn’t make it any easier to digest the enormity of what he was asking—of what everyone seemed to be asking—her to do.

“I can’t,” she said, daring a look at him. For as long as she could remember, she had wanted to be left alone, for no one to ask her about her scar, or her silence. But here he was throwing up reminders of what her life used to be like and, as much as it irritated her, she was grateful she wasn’t being left to deal with things by herself.

He regarded her a moment, then scratched the back of his head in a gesture so familiar, Emily felt as if she’d been thrown back to fifteen years earlier, when they were both nothing more than gangly, insecure teenagers.

“I’m hungry,” Tyler said with a yawn. “And pretty knackered too. So here’s my suggestion. We eat.” He took out his phone and started scrolling down the screen. “Surely even out here we can get a delivery. You still like spicy food?”

Emily nodded as she bent down to pull up a stray weed from in amongst the rosebushes. It made her think of the crushed rose her grandmother had kept, made her wonder if someone special had once given it to her and, if so, why Catriona had never spoken about them.

“Done. Should be here in half an hour.” Tyler shoved his hands in his pockets, rocked back and forth on his heels as he looked over at Emily, then around the garden. “If it’s okay with you, I’ll crash here tonight as it’s too late to head back to town.”

Emily sighed with relief that the journey was, at least for now, delayed. It would give her time to think, to consider what it was she wanted to do.

“I’ll take the spare room, or the sofa, or whatever,” Tyler said. “You know I can sleep pretty much anywhere.”