Up On Cove Bay

1

15 years later

Being an overachiever sucked, Rachel Corsie-Aitken concluded as she crawled into bed after midnight, mentally and physically drained after a roller-coaster day in SLC. She'd managed about twenty minutes of quality time with her twin daughters before they'd fallen asleep barely into the opening paragraph of Little Red Riding Hood. She'd eaten warmed up Chinese food for the third night in a row, then pulled out a half-dozen voluminous analysts' reports she needed to absorb before the stock exchange opened in the morning. Her bedtime reading was a lot more challenging than what Callie and Jessica chose.

She was good at her job as a chartered accountant for Ernst and Young, but so far it had cost her a marriage to Lisa, who was great, but had become tired of playing second fiddle to her career, and more sleep than she could possibly calculate. Though she shared custody of the twins with Lisa, she often felt as if she was barely acquainted with her five year old daughters. It sometimes seemed as if they spent more time with the child minder—and even her ex-wife—than they did with her. She'd long since lost sight of exactly what she was trying to prove and to whom.

When the phone rang, Rachel glances at the clock and groaned. At this hour, it could only be an emergency. Heart thudding, she reached for her phone.

"Rachel, it's me," her sister Erin announced. Ez was the youngest of the five Corsie siblings and the real night owl among them. Rachel stayed up late because it was the only way to cram enough work into a twenty-four hour day. Ez did it because she was just starting to hit her stride when the moon and stars came out. "I called earlier, but the minder said you weren't home yet. Then I got distracted with a project I'm working on. I hope it's not too late. I know you're usually up till all hours."

"It's fine," Rachel assured her. "Is everything okay? You sound stressed. Is something going on with gran? Or dad?"

"Gran is amazing. She'll outlive us all. And dad is off someplace, I can't keep track of him."

"He was in Glasgow last week," Rachel recalled.

"Then I guess he's still there. You know he has to oversee every single detail of the accounts he's working on. Of course, then he loses interest, just like he did with Aberdeen City."

There was an unsurprising note of bitterness in Ez's voice. As the youngest of five, she, more than the rest of them, had missed spending time with their dad. Ian had already been making a name for herself as a chartered accountant, especially when he rejuvenated the financial sector in Aberdeen and the Shire. He'd done it in partnership with his older brothers—one an architect, the other a financial advisor. It was to be the crown jewel in Ian's body of work and the idyllic place his family would call home. It hadn't turned out this way.

Ian and his brothers had fought over the construction, the financial market, environmental issues and even over the preservation of the few falling-down granite buildings in the city. Eventually they'd dissolved the partnership. Now, even though they all coexist in or near Aberdeen, they seldom speak except on holidays, when gran insisted on a pretence of family harmony.

Rachel's mother, Marion, had lived in London since she and Ian had divorced fifteen years ago. Though the plan had been for all of the children to move to London with her, for reasons Rachel had never understood, that hadn't happened. They'd stayed in Aberdeen with their mostly absent dad and their gran. In recent years, one by one they had drifted away, except for Ez, who seemed to have a love-hate relationship with the City and with Ian.