“Shit. See, I don’t know that. And also, I’m sorry. And also, it’s still worth watching, people give it a bad rap, but the ending is actually not what that show is all about. It actually aged into something more interesting.”

“That is exactly what you said to me last month when I was looking for something to watch.”

We’re silent for a moment. I drink my chai, she drinks her coffee.

“Well.” She stomps her feet and looks at me. “Let’s take your positively broken brain to the doc, shall we?”

CHAPTER FIVE

Well, it definitely isn’t a hospital.

When we arrive at Jim’s house, he is on all fours in his back garden in a feminine-looking sun hat, snipping herbs and collecting them in a basket.

Kiera greets him by saying, “Hiya, Jim! Half retirement suits you.”

“Girls, what brings you two round?”

She explains that I’m being weird, and that we wanted to get his professional opinion.

He takes us inside, shedding his dirt-covered gloves and uncinching the string of his hat to remove it, telling me to take a seat at the kitchen table.

I’m not sure what Kiera or I expected him to do, but he merely looks at my head all over, poking it and saying, “Does that hurt?” while I say no again and again. As if there might be a gaping wound somewhere that I hadn’t noticed. Like, Oh, I didn’t know the golf ball wedged into my skull was an issue.

“Open up those baby blues for me, love.”

I open my eyes wide, and he shines a pocket flashlight into each of them.

“Any nausea?” he asks.

“No.”

“Does your head hurt?”

“No.”

“Blurry vision?”

“Nope.”

After about a hundred more questions, he sits back and says, “You look all right to me, Meg,” and rolls his sleeves back down. Strange to hear this stranger say my name. “What did make you think something might be wrong?”

He’s a nice man, and he’s good-looking for being, I’d guess, in his seventies. He looks kinda like Sean Connery.

“I’ve had some … memory issues? I guess?” I say, understating the issue so much that Kiera laughs.

“A bit,” she says.

He arches a silver eyebrow. “That doesn’t surprise me; every time I run into you two, you’re at Cairdeas.”

“Does it seem like too much?” asks Kiera, a coy smile playing at her lips. “Answer carefully now, oul fella, because if you run into us every time you’re down the pub, and you think that’s a lot, then I guess what you’re saying is—”

“All right, all right, no need to get so spirited, Kiera. So what d’ya mean by memory issues?”

“Some short-term memory stuff.” I ignore Kiera’s eyes on me.

“Are you hallucinating at all?”

“Uh … well, I guess I wouldn’t know, would I?”