Picked up by stranger-boat, no doubt about it. Unty Jinna was inclined to blame the ills of the village on all but those in it.

Runned away, your wee doggie did, said Elspet, always one for the obvious.

Liza agreed, and she looked so smug that I thought for a moment she might know something, but no, she was just pleased that Ginger Meggie (Liza never called me anything but) had had one of her airs and graces knocked out of her.

Runned away … runned away … I loved Crusoe. I’d done my best to look after him. Why do the things we love have to run away?

~

After Fraserburgh, Kitta was sent south to Great Yarmouth on the train. The train! This was the last of the fishing stations for the season. By December it was over and the crews and teams had broken up, returned to their homes until the first of the New Year’s run. Da, Sailor Wattie and the boys came back from Lowestoft, and Kitta would soon be home. Would she be staying, I wanted to know, or going back to the fish in the New Year? But Ma was busy with Christmas and Hogmanay and much else besides. Hush your mouth, quinie, she said, an’ get those neeps an’ tatties scraped. No answer? I took it as a good sign.

Oh, the joyous homecoming I had imagined. Kitta and I would escape to the sheddie up on the braes, wrapped up warm in our shawls, and she would tell me about the sea journey, the gutting, the quines she worked with, where she lived, what Lerwick was like, and the Broch, and the faraway Sooth—all about the wide world beyond the boatie shore. Her disgrace would be forgotten and she would be welcomed back, accepted, as gutting girls now were. Respected as girls who worked hard for their families.

There was still much I had to learn, lambsie. Life goes on, true as the tide, washing up old and new like wrack from the sea. For all that I had railed against the new that had come among us, I had begun to think it a good thing that in time the old would lose its grip. But here’s the twist: sometimes the things you hope most will change are those, stubborn, that don’t.

When other people were around, Kitta was her usual lively self. And defiant. Girls who overheard her funny stories were envious. Anyone who’d thought the worst of her, who’d thought to quell her spirit—well, they were disappointed. But up on the braes, it was different.

I watched her. What was she seeing as she gazed, so quiet, out across the boatie shore? I thought of the edginess in Da and the boys when they returned, like they were not all here, like they’d left the rest of themselves behind in some faraway place more to their liking than home.