Page 9 of Suddenly Single
She’d left her money to Sandra, and the inn to him.
Edan had grown up in Balhaire, a tiny village in the shadow of an old Scottish Highland fortress by the same name. He was the son of a fisherman who was generally out of reach physically and emotionally.Edan’s older brother had gone into fishing with his father, and Edan had, too.But when Clara had asked him to come to America and help with the inn just before his thirtieth birthday, he’d lept at the chance.He liked fishing—he just preferred it standing in a trout stream, and not out on the ocean.He did not care for deep-sea commercial fishing at all.
The Cassian Inn was a shadow of what it had once been, as depicted in various old photos around the dining room.Modern finishes and the hacking of grand rooms to create smaller, functional ones, had replaced the Victorian charm.The population around the lake had grown up on the north shore, and even the addition of his golf course had not been enough to bring guests around to the south side of the lake.In the last few years, it had become increasingly difficult to keep the inn booked when just five miles around the bend one might have a room at a the Lake Haven Spa Resort, with upscale spa facilities, boats, and nightly concerts.
Still, for his aunt and Sandra, Edan had done what he could.Rosalyn was the head cook and Hugh the head groundskeeper.Sandra kept the inn clean and the old bachelor Ned manned their little farm. Together, they’d kept the inn lumbering along.
Three years ago, Edan had struck up an online relationship with a girl he’d known in Balhaire. Two years ago, just before Clara’s death, Audra had come from Scotland to live with him at the inn.Eight months ago, Audra told Edan she wasn’t feeling it anymore.It wasn’t the inn, she said. It was him.All him. They weren’t on the “same page,” whatever page that was. She missed Scotland, she said.
“Then we’ll go home,” Edan had said instantly.He loved Audra.He had envisioned a quiet life for the two of them, with children eventually, all of them enjoying the relative peace at Lake Haven.
“Aye, Edan, I want to go home.But alone,” she’d said with a wince.
There was, of course, more discussion between them.More of his faults had been succinctly outlined for him.He understood Audra had grown bored of life in America, and maybe he’d been a little bored, too. But he’d been blindsided by the news she didn’t love him anymore. “I donna know if I ever did, if I am being honest,” she’d added, far too casually.
Edan hadn’t know what he was to do with that.They had a wedding date.Everyone back home had booked their tickets to the States to see it.He had plans, concrete plans, which started with a wedding.
But she’d packed her wedding dress and left, and Edan had been stuck listening to the happy planning of Rosalyn and Hugh’s wedding and listening to break-up songs in his spare time.
To the point he couldn’t take it.
To the point he’d decided he ought to be in Scotland.That of course Audra was right, it was too bucolic, too staid.He had come up with the altered plan: He would sell the inn and move back to Scotland and prove to Audra she’d made a mistake.Of course she had.They’d been wild about each other in the beginning.Wires had been crossed, that was all.What was he doing here, anyway?
Yes, Edan had a plan, and he was marching along with it, crossing item after item off the to-do list. He was going back to Scotland to start over.
Today was the last day of his little vacation.The inn would reopen Friday morning for the last bookings, and there was still much work to be done to close the inn down. He planned to reflect on it all with a bit of fishing, perhaps make some mental revisions to the blueprint.
Thank God Rosalyn wasn’t here to badger him about it. She said he spent too much time alone.Rosalyn meant well; she loved him like a brother.She and Hugh were concerned about him.Poor bloke, they said,he lost his fiancée.Poor man, they said,he rarely speaks.
That was just his nature.Jenny was right—he was a man of few words.He didn’t even know how to come up with more words if he were so inclined.
Audra had complained about it.“Why will you no’saysomething?” she’d said after one heated argument. Edan had never understood what she wanted, exactly. Hedidsay things. Just not in long sentences.In fact, now that he was alone, entire days could pass without him uttering a word.
God willing, today would be one of those blessedly quiet days.
Edan dressed, grabbed an apple on his way out, and went down to the shed to gather his tackle and waders.His two Scottish terriers, Wilbur and Boz, trotted along behind him, their snouts to the ground.They followed him to the river’s edge past the ruins of an old river mill and a pair of cottage rentals that sat empty.
There was a spot here that he liked very much, a natural outcropping of stones under which trout liked to hide. Old Buggar lived under those rocks.Edan had been trying to catch the brown trout for two years.He’d come dangerously close at the end of last summer, but the bastard had outwitted him time and again.That was disquieting, really, given that a brown trout’s brain was the size of an English pea.
Edan affixed his favorite lure to the line, one his father had given to him long ago. “Never lose it, lad,” he’d said.“This lure will catch the biggest fish, aye?” That particular day with his father was a vivid memory, and Edan was sentimental about the lure.He’d kept it all these years, but he’d never come close to catching the biggest fish with it.
He’d have to bring that up with his father when he saw him again.
He affixed the lure to his line and waded into the river. He cast his line.The lure floated softly along the current—until something nibbled at it, jerking it to the right, and Edan began the slow, methodic reeling in.
The line came up empty.
Old Buggar was hungry, was he? He began to swing his arm to cast again, and had just begun to throw when the dogs startled him by barking wildly.He jerked and cast his arm too wide as he tried to catch his balance and the line sailed into a thick hedge of wild bramble bushes on the shore.
“No!Bad dog!” a woman shouted.
“God save me,” Edan muttered.He turned and scanned the bank.There she was, the woman who couldn’t read a sign if it hit her on her nose, the woman who had taken his only bag of crisps, the woman who bent her body in strange ways on his tee box.And now, she’d caused him to toss his line and tangle it in a bush.
He whistled at Wilbur and Boz as he began to slosh toward his tangled line.“Come, you bloody heathens,” he shouted to them.The dogs obediently turned away from Jenny and trotted back to him.
“Oh, hey! I didn’t see you there!” she called out to him, waving as if he hadn’t seen her, either.
Edan reached the bush where his lure had gone.Sharp thorns were thick in the branches. His line was hopelessly caught, the lure dangling in the middle of the stems. Edan reached into a pocket for a knife, cut the line from his pole and set his pole aside.The lure was in the thickest part of the damn bush.Edan carefully reached in. As he worked to free it, grimacing at the nicks of the thorns, he heard feet clomping toward him on the well-worn path beside the river.
