Page 40 of Of Heather and Thistle

H eather woke before sunrise, yesterday’s weight pressing down like a boulder.

She had slept, but not rested. The safety she’d felt the night before—that fragile sense of forward motion—already felt like mist dissolving in the morning light.

Soon, she’d set off to the storage unit, leaving Byrdie behind at the inn.

The cat had settled in nicely at the bed and breakfast, and Heather wasn’t sure she could manage the storage trip with her curious feline companion in tow.

As she pulled up to the unit, Heather was taken aback.

Flynn’s crew had already moved so much of the furniture out that the place looked emptier than when she’d left it the day before.

She could hear the buzz of their voices as they worked and the sound of furniture being shifted around.

They were clearly on a tight schedule and moving faster than she expected.

Heather stood with her hands on her hips, eyeing the overstuffed storage unit Flynn had secured in town. Boxes stacked haphazardly, furniture wedged into every available space—one particularly rebellious trunk looked one sneeze away from toppling.

“This is your idea of organization?” she asked, eyeing the stack like it might explode.

Flynn, standing beside her, crossed his arms. “It’s all there, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, and I’m guessing if I pull the wrong box, the whole thing’s coming down like Jenga on a tilt.”

“You wound me, lass,” he said dryly. “That’s quality stacking there.” Heather snorted, stepping carefully inside—like one wrong move might trigger an avalanche of ancestral regrets and dusty secrets.

She ran a hand over the dust-covered edge of an old wooden cabinet—something about it felt faintly familiar. “Well, I hope you’re proud of yourself, Flynn. You’ve single-handedly turned multiple lifetimes of family history into a really sketchy game of hide-and-seek.”

He smirked, leaning against the frame of the roll-up door. “You’re just mad I got it done before you could supervise.”

Heather turned to face him, narrowing her eyes. “I will find something to yell at you about. Just give me a minute.”

“Take yer time, Campbell,” he said. “But if ye actually want to find anything, we might need to do this my way.” Heather arched a brow.

“And what may I ask is that?”

Flynn grinned, stepping forward and reaching past her to a box marked ‘fragile’ near the bottom of the stack. “Trial and error.” Before she could protest, he yanked the box free.

The boxes moaned under the sudden shift, a creak of pure betrayal. Heather took one step back. “Amazing. You broke physics.”

Flynn barely had time to react before an entire stack of boxes wobbled and started to fall. Heather jumped back as an old framed portrait tilted forward and smacked Flynn square in the chest. He caught it instinctively, stumbling back slightly as dust exploded into the air.

Silence.

Heather pressed her lips together, watching him blink through two-hundred-year-old dust, the painting still clutched against his chest. Finally, she crossed her arms. “So, just for clarification—this is your way?”

Flynn batted dust from his shirt like it had personally insulted him. “Aye. Controlled chaos.”

Heather fought back a laugh. “Sure. Very controlled.”

She wasn’t sure when it started—this sharp, unfiltered banter with Flynn—but it unsettled her how natural it felt.

She had spent most of her life learning how to be agreeable, smooth over rough edges, and blend in instead of standing out.

With her father, silence had been survival.

With Ivy, deference had been a habit. With past boyfriends, she had been soft, accommodating, and never the one to push back.

But with Flynn, something cracked open.

She quipped back without thinking, meeting his sarcasm with her own.

It was unnerving, thrilling, and addictive.

She should’ve felt off balance around him—but instead, she felt awake, sharp, like someone had finally spoken her language.

Like some long-buried version of herself had been waiting for someone who could keep up. And Flynn kept up.

The strangest part? He didn’t seem surprised by it. Almost as if he had seen that side of her before she had even realized it existed. She remembered once trying to tell her father she was afraid.

She was ten—old enough to recognize grief, too young to survive it alone. The TV was flickering in the dark and a liquor bottle was tipped on its side.

“Dad?” she’d said, barely above a whisper. “Can we talk?”

He didn’t even look at her. Just muttered, “About what?”

She’d wanted to say, I’m scared. To ask, Why does everything feel wrong? But the words never came. They caught in her throat like splinters.

Instead, she just shook her head. “Never mind.”

He never looked back.

She had spent so much of her life swallowing words, silencing herself before anyone else could. She’d learned early that quiet was safer than risk being dismissed.

With Flynn, she didn’t hesitate. Didn’t second-guess.

She spoke before she thought—pushed without fear of being pushed away.

And that scared her more than she wanted to admit.

Heather spent hours in the storage unit, the dust and silence of the place wrapping around her like a blanket.

She worked methodically, sorting through the piles of boxes, some packed to the brim and others barely taped shut.

Each item felt like a thread from her mother’s past—and with each passing hour, the weight of it pulled heavier.

She started with the old photographs—images of her mother as a young girl in Scotland, smiling with friends at what looked like a birthday party from the ‘70s. There were pictures of her at the beach, the hills, and family gatherings. The vibrant, sunlit photos starkly contrasted Heather’s foggy memories of her mother, so distant in some ways but present in others.

It was strange to see her mother as a child, as a person who had a life before she ever became Heather’s mom .

She found a stack of old birthday cards tucked inside one of the boxes, the handwriting instantly recognizable—curvy, neat, undeniably her mother’s.

There were sweet, often funny notes written to family members and friends.

She flipped through them slowly, pausing to read a few, her heart-tugging as she imagined her mother writing them in a time and place that seemed so foreign now.

There were also trinkets from her mother’s teenage years—small gifts, a handkerchief embroidered with delicate stitching, and a few items foreign to Heather—things from a life she’d never truly understood.

Her mother had left Scotland for the United States to attend university, where she met Heather’s father.

All Heather had ever known was the version of her mother, who was already firmly planted in American life, married and raising her.

It was hard to imagine her mother ever being this young woman with a life in another world—a life that Heather had never been a part of.

As she sifted through more boxes, Heather came across a few more personal items—books, letters, even some old records her mother had kept, with handwritten labels on the sleeves.

They all felt like pieces of a puzzle Heather couldn’t fully see.

The more she uncovered, the more it felt like peeking into a life she’d never been invited to—a version of her mother she could never truly meet.

A few of the items seemed unnecessary, relics from a past that was long gone, but the deeper she went, the more attached she became to the memories embedded in each item.

She couldn’t throw everything away. But she also knew that not everything should be kept either.

Hours passed, the task feeling endless, but with each item, Heather began to understand her mother in new ways.

It was a strange and bittersweet experience, seeing her mother not just as the woman who had raised her but as the woman who had lived her own entire, vibrant life before—the life Heather had never really understood—until now.

Heather carefully opened a wooden box tucked at the bottom of the trunk. The box was worn with age, its edges rough and chipped, but it had been carefully preserved. As she lifted the lid, she was met with a faint, musty smell—a mix of old wood and forgotten time.

Inside, she found a folded bundle of fabric.

Her hands trembled slightly as she unwrapped it, revealing an ancient Scottish flag.

The material was faded, its once vibrant colors now muted by age.

Frayed at the edges, but unmistakable—the white saltire stretched across faded blue.

Time had worn it down, but the history still clung to it.

She couldn’t help but be struck by how… important it felt.

Next to the flag was a piece of parchment, yellowed and brittle, almost disintegrating as she unfolded it carefully. The writing was hard to read, the ink faded with age. But when Heather’s fingers brushed over the parchment, one date stood out.

April 16th.

The date tugged at her memory; important, familiar—but just out of reach.

She stared at it momentarily, the numbers lingering in her mind, but no particular memory or explanation came to her.

The pieces of the past she was uncovering felt like they were about to fall into place, yet the weight of this particular date left her with an unsettling feeling of mystery.