If you asked Kitta where the fire-iron was, she would tell you. She would make a pot of tea and ask who was wanting a cup. She would say, Pass the salt, will ye, Meggie mine. If someone sneezed, her usual response: Bless thee well. Every small and trivial thing, like nothing had happened. But she drew a veil over everything I wanted to know. She never talked about it. She never really talked to me again.

I couldn’t talk, either. Magnus Tulloch’s letters came, and I put them away in the shottle of my kist. I suppose I was the same as my sister, doing what she had done. Sometimes that’s just the way of it—we do what we must to put one foot after the other and keep on, keep on, just keep going.

~

It was me who buried the baby. High up, behind the scaur. As close as I could get to the sky.

19

We entered Lerwick harbour in the aftermath of a storm, when you could feel the air spiritless, spent. Standing alone on the deck of the St Giles was a kind of awakening. I had lived through the beginning of the season in Stornaway but had not felt it, had closed off the soft part of me that could feel. Weak, I told myself, a weakness to spare myself from everything now returning like a wave. Guilt over leaving Kitta, abandoning her to Roanhaven while I ran away again. Grief for the loss of my mother, and for the little one who never did exist. Back it came, all of it. I slumped against the railing, awash.

Clementina Slater staggered up beside me, puffing a whitened breath none too sweet after all the roiling and retching hours from Stornaway.

Give me a wee look at your hands, quinie, she demanded, holding hers out to me. I held mine the same, palms up, and it was a shocking thing, proof of how much else I had managed not to feel. The dressings on my fingers were stained, the salty holes weeping.

Clementina’s hands were beautiful. She’d never been bothered by salt, and oil from the herring—especially the roes—had made her skin as smooth as butter.

I flexed my hands only a little and there it was: pain. Like penance.

Ach, she said, disgusted. Didn’t I say it from the start? Ye’re a disaster.

~

It felt like a homecoming, walking to Gremista. Liza chattered away next to me, one question following the next, tweet, tweet. Clementina’s patience with her was tattered already. She rolled her eyes at me meaningfully but I was too distracted to save her from Liza.