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encouraged that belief. She was a bioengineer whose work centered around finding a way to help paraplegics regain use of their limbs through bypassing the damaged nerves and creating new synthetic pathways for the impulses to travel.
    They had met when she attended a seminar on income management for foreign professionals in Glasgow, and he was instantly captivated. She sat in the back of the room, taking notes on a laptop. She was focused, clearly evaluating every word he was saying for merit, and he found himself wanting to impress her. She asked a few questions, and despite her disclaimer that finances left her dazed and confused, her questions were of a higher level than he had been prepared to address.
    It wasn’t that he didn’t know the answers—he was as well-versed in his field as she was in hers—but there was something deeply exciting about the mind that had formed them. She was quietly attractive—brown hair, light eyes, pale skin—and dressed casually in dark trousers and a soft gray jumper, but to William she glittered like the brightest star.
    God, how he missed those early days.
    “Did you say something?” George looked at him with curious eyes.
    He shook his head. “Not a word.”
    “I’m thinking about a massage,” George said as the countryside raced by the window. “Some sake. I need to take the edge off.” He grinned at William. “Are you on?”
    “Sorry,” William said. “I’ll order room service and try to get caught up for tomorrow’s presentation.”
    True enough. He needed to bring himself up to speed, but that wasn’t the reason. George treated overseas trips as a license to cheat. George’s idea of a great night was trolling the bars of whatever city they happened to be in, sampling the women like they were pastries in a breakfast buffet.
    All William wanted was a room, a phone that worked. He wanted to hear Joely’s voice drifting toward him across the miles and Annabelle’s laughter when he told her one of the terrible elephant jokes she loved. He wanted to hear stories about the solstice picnic. He wanted to know that Joely was still there. Not just for Annabelle’s sake. Not just from habit or convenience or loneliness, but because she wanted to be there.
    In the beginning she had resisted his attempts to bring her together with Annabelle. He had wanted to drive her up to Loch Craig to see his house, meet his daughter, but she always had an excuse. She claimed she was a city girl and that country living was anathema to her. “If you ever bring Annabelle down to Glasgow, I’d love to have lunch,” she had said once, but beyond that it was clear she simply wasn’t interested.
    Normally that would have been enough to send William packing. He had had a handful of brief flirtations since Natasha’s sudden death but nothing that amounted to anything at all. No woman had made him want to take that first step into the future until he met Joely and was overwhelmed by the desire to open up his heart, his family, his life to her.
    It took him two months, but she finally agreed to drive up to Loch Craig with him, ostensibly to see the house and, coincidentally, his daughter. She didn’t speak much on the drive into the Highlands. The silence was so deep and all-encompassing that he was afraid she could hear the beating of his heart above the low roar of the engine.
    He had always considered Americans to be a talkative race, cheerful and big and full of funny anecdotes and endless chat. She was none of those things. She was a quiet, introspective woman with a doctorate in biomedical engineering who wore sadness the way another woman wore Chanel. He had been quite desperate to break through that wall of reserve, but his own reserve made it difficult to know where to start.
    The only thing he knew with certainty was that she belonged at Loch Craig, and he found himself praying to the God who seemed to have deserted him that she would fall in love with the place the way he had