Aye, he had heard so from the families of others who had gone. But I am thinking, Meggie … in time … There is land in Australia, all that space, millions of acres of new land, an’ if a man works hard, well. He pushed back his hair. That shine again in his eyes. We could have a different life, Meggie. Better.

Going on the land was a something to me, not the Something I could see it was to Magnus Tulloch. But I hugged him, listened as he dreamed aloud.

The idea of Magnus Tulloch and I leaving for the other end of the world should have thrown into array the beat of a staid Roanhaven heart. But no. Straightaway it seemed right. I liked living in Lerwick well enough, and Gracie had firmly thrown the net of family over her stranger-sister. But this place did not have the stamp of home for me and I feared it ever would be so. I looked down at my hands, with their pits and scars, the deformed stump, and tried to imagine myself somewhere warm, somewhere young and clean. I thought: Of course, aye, that is what we are meant to do.

And the notion I could leave behind the darkness …

Magnus Tulloch began to make plans, then arrangements, and the biggest thing to qualm me was the prospect of leaving Clementina—Clementina, who was my family now. She was not saying much.

And there was Gracie. Magnus Tulloch’s sister wrote me wailing letters, begging me to make him see sense, change his mind.

The other side of the world, Meggie Tulloch! We will never see ye again, never see your wee bairns when they come!

Gracie and Karl had three little ones of their own already and she was ever hopeful for me, ever kind, always saying, It will be your turn soon, our Meggie, don’t ye fret on that. She would never have understood, never, that we were taking measures, as it was called in those days, something I’d learned at the farlins. Because I did not want a bairn.

Back then, I could not explain myself, words stuttered to nought. My reason was a picture only I could see: waves tossing a wee creature back and forth in the shallows. It froze my heart, it was everything I wanted to forget, everything I could not bear, did not want.

Even now, when I have the words, they turn into questions. Was it that I couldn’t allow myself to have what Kitta had lost? Or that what Kitta had lost had killed her? Maybe it was both. But maybe, too, I was frightened of loving someone so much again. The idea of having to keep a wee life safe, of never failing them, ever. A burden just too great.