she’ll regret it. “Tomorrow.”
“Brilliante. Come to my room before evening, Greer will help you”—she makes a sweep of Alba’s person—“with all this. You will look beautiful. You will have wonderful time. Maybe . . .” Carmen winks. “Maybe we even find a boy for you.”
After Carmen leaves, Alba waits for Stella to reappear. She thinks of the letters, of the clues. She thinks of her mother, who scatters little secrets about Albert in her daughter’s dreams, urging her to look for him and to contact Edward, who has secrets of his own to share and who, having been lost in widowerhood for too long, now wants to connect with his sister. Alba sighs.
“Okay, enough sighing.” Stella materializes in the sink. “What are you going to do now?”
“I’m thinking about it.”
“Enough thinking. You think too much,” Stella says. “It’s time to take action. “
“I’m not ready.”
“If you wait until you’re ready, you’ll be dead,” Stella says. “And, as a life strategy, I don’t really recommend it.”
Despite herself Alba smiles.
“What do you want to do?” Stella asks. “That’s the only question that really matters.”
The ghost looks at Alba then with such a pure and truthful gaze, unencumbered by exception or judgment, that Alba feels suddenly free. Her fear evaporates, leaving only her desire.
“I want to find my father.”
Stella smiles.
Chapter Ten
What’s it like to have a daughter who doesn’t know you exist? For Albert Mackay, it’s as though he’s only half alive. Because, if Alba can’t see him, can’t touch him, then how does he know he’s really here, a living, breathing man and not simply a fictional character?
When Elizabeth Ashby told him she couldn’t abandon her other children, that she had to try and make her marriage work, to bring Alba up as Charles’s daughter, she asked Albert to move away. She said it was too painful knowing he was nearby, close enough but impossible to touch. And so he did, for both their sakes. He knew that walking down the same streets they’d walked together, fearful of bumping into his lover and their giggling baby would be too painful to bear. Albert moved as far as he could while remaining in the same country, so he’d know he was breathing the same air and seeing the same sunset as the daughter who would never know him.
When he moved to Inverie, the most remote village in Scotland (at the time not connected to the mainland by road, with Glasgow a boat trip and five-hour train ride away), Albert thought he could pretend the rest of the world didn’t exist, that there wasn’t another man out there raising his daughter and sharing a bed with the love of his life. Unfortunately, Albert soon found it wasn’t any easier to bear the pain of this from a distance of four hundred and ninety-one miles than it was from three.
Albert got a job in the local primary school, but being with the ten children all day, teaching them to spell and make sense of Shakespeare, pushed him over the edge. And, when he fell, it was into broken glass. Every night he finished a bottle of wine and five inches of brandy. At midnight, he smashed the empty bottles against the stone wall at the bottom of his garden so that over the years the soil was covered with layers and layers of multicolored glass. Every year on Alba’s birthday he drank a bottle of champagne and an unspecified amount of vodka until he passed out.
And then, on her seventh birthday, he stopped. He had a dream the night before, the most vivid experience of his life. In it his daughter was crying, begging him to come and save her from something. When he woke, her terror and need for him was just as visceral as it had been in the middle of the night. It felt like a prophecy. That day he stopped drinking. Just in case. Just in case his daughter ever needed him. As the weeks went by Albert imagined that somehow, over distance and logic, if Alba ever needed him he would know, he would feel her. And, if and when that miraculous day ever came, he wanted to be sober for it.
—
Greer can feel herself starting to fall. She’s forgetting about food, clothes and all the minor practicalities of life and instead thinks only of him. Blake has bitten her, entered her bloodstream and left her drugged. She walks around in a fog of desire, feeling him watching and waiting