Everything We Left in Edinburgh

Wren Halloway is the calmest person in any room she walks into, and she has built a career on it. Ten years ago she put on her wedding dress at Kerrow Castle, on the East Lothian coast, left a note on the dressing table and walked out through the garden gate with three hundred guests waiting in the chapel. She has told the story at dinners ever since, neatly, with a small joke at her own expense at the end. Now her father’s hotel group needs a heritage Scottish venue by Friday to save a merger, and the name on the paperwork is Kerrow.

Duncan Kerr rebuilt the estate from a ruin, much of it with his own hands, and he has one condition. She stays the week, Sunday to Sunday, and watches a wedding go through the house before she tells him what it’s worth. Her room is next door to the one she dressed in. His sister still remembers exactly how many orders of service came back. His mother walks up the drive in the rain to bring her a hot water bottle. And in the stable loft there are eleven taped boxes holding everything she left behind, labelled in his handwriting.

Wren has spent ten years telling the neat version. Duncan has spent them keeping things he says aren’t his to throw out. With a deadline, a storm and a man who has never once bluffed, she has one week to decide whether to tell him the truth, and to say one thing she can’t take back.