The Elf Widow

Trouble

Aubrey's dark blue eyes widened. "Move? Elsewhere? I can't move." She turned her back on him and hurried away up the steps. When she reached the front door, she pressed her hand against it. Drawing a deep breath, she said, "I work here."

She emphasized the last word so strangely that David's back tensed up. Before he could come up with a response, she twisted the doorknob and fled inside.

He went after her. He had to make her see reason.

When he entered the main room of the farmhouse, she faced him again. She was already wearing her pinafore apron.

David put on a smile. "Nobody's... firing you. We're offering you a different kind of work... better work."

Aubrey's eyes narrowed and her forehead knotted with an anger David hadn't thought her capable of. Striding forward, she yanked her basket from his hands. "I told you from the first, and I'm telling you for the last time now. I work here. I'll hear no more about it."

When she flounced away, David pressed his fingertips to his temples. "You're being ridiculous," he muttered.

"What was that?" She spun back around. "Ridiculous am I?"

David grimaced. How had he fallen down this rabbit hole? "Let me explain." Striving for calm, he clasped his hands in the most placating pose he could muster. "We're getting the money to rent real offices, and we want you to come with us. Just to Glasgow. It's not like I'm asking you to move out from, well, from wherever it is you live when you're not here."

"You know where I live."

David rolled his eyes. "'Over the hill and around the way,'" he quoted from her app profile. "Yeah, right."

For a moment, Aubrey's anger lessened, subsiding into what looked like profound, almost motherly disappointment. The daydreams that had been floating through his mind as he had waited for her—whimsies of a new partner to make his work and his life meaningful again—they faded as well.

If he couldn't convey that vision to Aubrey, the only argument left was the fallback one, the one well-known to sway the majority of people. "If you come with us, you'll get more money too."

Aubrey shrieked. She lifted her heavy basket one-handed above her head then slammed it down. Half a dozen shepherd's pies bounced out top down on the wooden floor. Wild cherries flew under the desks. "How many times do I have to explain it before you understand? You don't pay me!"

He stood his ground. "Somebody does. I mean you don't do this for..." He let his voice trail off, remembering the word Aubrey had typed was her greatest motivator.

"You understand better than you'll allow yourself to believe, David Castlellaw. I do my work for the same reason you do yours. I do it for those who are gone."

He stared at her then shook his head. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Yes, you do. All those strange things you conjure in those mysterious boxes of yours—those computers. Don't deny you do that for your long-lost Kate. I have my work, too, and I've been at it a long time longer than you. Without it, I'm unbound—a wandering soul."

David's mouth was dry. His mind raced with thoughts that didn't bear thinking. He moistened his lips. "I know when you lose a loved one, it can seem—"

"Stop it. Just stop it. You know perfectly well what I'm talking about. You told me yourself. Glaistig. That's what I am. I'm tied to this house—to this place where my Robbie bedded me, where I birthed our wee lassies and our wee laddie. They were my reason for living. They're the reason I live now."