The 18 year old Blake fled Ballarat with barely a backward glance. In his eagerness to escape the father he resented and the girl he didn't love enough, even Edinburgh didn't seem too far to go. His spirits lifted immediately he arrived, and not even the chill of the haar could hide the beauty of the place.
So he made a new life, rejecting everything Ballarat had offered, travelling Europe and Asia, living a life of excitement and danger. And the wife he chose, Mei Lin, she was everything his father would have rejected - foreign, reserved, proud. To Lucien she was exotic, fun loving and strong, and he fell in love with her on sight.
Years later he went unwillingly back to his home town. Pushing fifty, defeated in his attempts to put his family back together, in a limbo of not knowing, he went back to watch his father die. No grand reconciliation this; they both played the part required of them and Lucien found himself walking in his father's footsteps.
Even Jean was his father's. Her constant comparisons between Lucien and his father grated on him. He wasn't his father - and had no wish to be. Yet slowly, so slowly, he saw something in her. So different to Mei Lin, yet she had strength and pride too, and her reserve covered a life time of hardship that had still not hardened her.
He felt himself sliding into love. No headlong fall this time; they were older, more cautious. But this woman, who had scarcely ever left the town he had run so far from, kept him in Ballarat. While she was there, he would never leave. He was reconciled to its memories now, held there by a quiet Australian woman that he had travelled the world to find, only to discover her back at home, in his home.
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Author's note: Haar is a Scottish word for a chilly fog that blows in off the sea, usually in the summer. I lived in Edinburgh for 7 years and it's one of my abiding memories of the place (which in other ways is a fantastic place to live).