Page 51 of Merry & Bright

“How out of hand? Did it get physical?”

“No—though I was shouting pretty loudly.” Cam closed his eyes. “And I might’ve called him a fucking busybody with nothing better to do that interfere in other people’s business.”

“Ouch.” Eilidh paused before adding, “I reckon it was pretty shitty of him to call the council on you, but I can sort of see that if he spends money complying with all those rules you weren’t bothering with...”

“I know, I know.” Cam sighed. “Afterwards, I thought better of it, but it was too late by then. I was too embarrassed to come back here, and I know for a fact all the other villagers heard about it. They pretty much all stopped speaking to me—”

“Oh, Cam!”

He looked up at that, almost wincing to see the pity in his sister’s gaze.

“It was my own fault,” he said.

“Why didn’t you mention this before?”

Cam shrugged. “It’s not important.”

“Of course it is,” she replied softly, adding, “I thought you seemed down at Christmas. And when we had the chat about Mum and Dad—well, I guessed then that something was up.”

He knew exactly what chat she was talking about. She’d taken him aside on Christmas Day to ask him when he was going to find his own place so that Mum and Dad could get the use of their holiday cottage back. They’d been unable to use it all year with him living in it. Cam had just stared at Eilidh for a long betraying moment, then stammered out something about looking for a place in the new year.

Even then he’d known she suspected something was up.

“Can I ask you something, Cam?” Eilidh sounded tentative but she’d realised now that she was onto something and Cam knew how relentless she could be.

He sighed. “Okay.”

“Is everything really all right with the business?”

That was another thing she’d been asking him about at Christmas—and he’d insisted everything was fine. Now, sitting here in Rob Armstrong’s café, he opened his mouth to utter the lie again, but he couldn’t do it. Instead he just stared at Eilidh, saying nothing, and it felt as though he had a rock in his chest, like he couldn’t breathe.

“Cam?” his sister prodded. When he still said nothing, she said, “When you were talking about selling coffee at the boatshed, you said—you said you needed the money...” She trailed off, her tone uncertain and Cam closed his eyes.

For a while he didn’t speak, didn’t move. Just sat there with his eyes shut, wishing everything would just go away. Then Eilidh’s fingers touched his hand, a cool prompt.

“I had to borrow some money for the start-up costs,” he said raggedly. “Mum and Dad guaranteed the loan—did they tell you?”

“I thought your redundancy money—”

“It wasn’t enough,” Cam interrupted. “I thought I could afford the payments—I did forecasts and I thought they were pretty conservative. But the bookings are proving to be more seasonal than I thought they’d be. Summer looks fine—good actually—but I’ve got nothing coming in for the next few months, and there’s another loan payment due in three weeks’ time...” He swallowed, hard, and made himself look at Eilidh. Her fine brows were drawn together with concern.

“You said everything was going great at Christmas.”

“I didn’t want Mum and Dad to worry.”

“You owe them the truth, Cam. If they’re on the hook for that debt, they need to know.”

“I know,” he said, closing his eyes again. “I do know that.”

“They’ll want to help you—they’ve got savings. So have I.”

He shook his head at that, a hard, swift negation. “No way. I can’t take any more from them, or you. I got myself into this mess—”

Eilidh made an impatient noise at that. “You never could take help from anyone. No wonder Mum worries about you so much!”

“What?” Cam felt a weird stab of hurt at that. He’d fondly imagined he was the ‘easy’ one of the three McMorrow kids. He’d done better academically than either Eilidh or Ross and had always been the most self-reliant of them. He’d supported himself at university by working twenty plus hours a week at a gym, then landed a graduate position with a global accountancy firm.

Even when he’d been made redundant, he’d pretty much picked himself up off the floor within a day or two, resolving to see his predicament as an opportunity. He’d already realised by then that he didn’t love being an accountant, that what he really loved was being outdoors, pitting himself against nature, challenging his body to its limits. And with the redundancy package, he had the chance to build a business of his own, one that would enable him to do what he loved every day.