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Mrs. MacDonald touches her shoulder, and that’s it, that’s all Jen can take. Enough.
    She turns and flees back to the house, leaving mud and rainwater in her wake like fairy-story breadcrumbs. She shuts herself up in the close, quietness of her Da’s en suite shower stall. The pouf still smells of his cologne body wash, fills her nose with the scent of warm, gripping hugs she will never have again, and she crumples against the tiles and weeps, and weeps, and weeps.

    Despite the large house and the land surrounding it, Carterhaugh Estate isn’t wealthy. Nor is it really an estate. Jennet and her Da were not part of the peerage, never mind that the people of the nearby Selkirk call them “Lord” and “Lady” out of respect, and Jennet herself draws only a modest stipend from the family trust.
    The house itself is two stories above ground and one below that comprises the pantry and kitchens with big dug-out windows. She and her father had apartments in the upper part of the house at the front, and there are two guest rooms and a study at the back. The ground floor is home to the formal dining room, the informal breakfast room, a sitting room that her father had filled with cleverly hidden electronics like a television and a sound system, two servant’s quarters occupied by Mrs. MacDonald and Mr. Coldwell when they aren’t in the mood to head back to their homes in Selkirk, and their shared bathroom. The house was old enough and well cared for enough to qualify for heritage status with the government, but that would mean needing to put in some cash for the restorations, and frankly they just don’t have the money.
    As the only surviving blood kin to the Lord of Carterhaugh, Jennet is entailed the manor, the grounds, and a hundred acres of farmland which has been rented by the same family for the last three generations. Jennet inherits very little beyond the trust, the interest on which pays the salaries of Mr. Coldwell and Mrs. Macdonald, and for their consumables. The money from the farming tenants goes towards the upkeep of the house, and Jennet’s admittedly modest lifestyle. Jen doesn’t work, per se, but she does sit on the board of several of the local chartities, arts centres, and business associations.
    Included in the manor’s grounds is a triangular plain crisscrossed with famous, so-called fairy circles, and just enough forest to get lost in. The forest borders both the Yarrow and the Ettrick, inhabits the fork where the two tributaries come together and head off as one to the far away North Sea.
    From the window seat of her apartment, Jennet can see a doe with her fawn grazing along the edge of the lawn, sticking close to the trees. Her father’s grave is on the other side of the house, hidden behind the crumbling family chapel, and she is absurdly thankful that it isn’t visible from her sitting room.
    She’s fled here after a day full of long, painful discussion and even more heart-breaking choices. She watches the deer and clutches a cup of tea and does her best to empty her mind. But even mother nature, it seems, is determined to not let her hide away from the thought of children.
    The truth of it is this: Jennet can afford to remain at Carterhaugh, could probably live on the trust and the entail indefinitely, but the question has become – who will get it after? Who will Jennet name as her heir?

    A few decades ago, Carterhaugh was open to tourists, like the grand houses of the Historical Trust used to do in the old days. There once were parts of the house that were staged, but so few people came out to the manor that they had repurposed the spare rooms as Jennet’s nursery and her Da’s study when she’d been small. With no wee ones in house and the building aging at a rate that is beginning to outpace the living’s ability to keep up the repairs, perhaps it is time, Mr. Coldwell floats as the three of them huddle over a pot of tea on the rough scullion’s table in the kitchen, to