Then Mary Ahearn was at our door, come the summer’s end, uncharacteristically thin from her grief, a summer dress hanging loose across her collarbones, Jade-Marie in her arms, a baby with springy curls and fat wrists. Mary begged my father for work and when he said that he had nothing, that what she was asking for was unreasonable, impossible, she grew hysterical, threatening. My mother lifted Jade-Marie from her arms and placed the soft animal weight of her in my lap at the kitchen table, before leading Mary into the back garden to talk more privately. Jade-Marie had snuffled and blown bubbles, staring up at me expectantly with her green-brown gaze. So, I had sung to her, because that seemed to be the answer to everything then: ‘Lord of the Dance’ – we had just learnt the harmonies in Sunday School.

Here, my mind stalled. It couldn’t have been that song, the same one that Jade-Marie had, all grown-up, bellowed in chapel at the beginning of term. My mind was playing tricks.

I searched my memory for details that were definitely true.

The huge metal cross at the end of the harbour – that was real. It was still there, erected after a campaign by Jacob and Diana Crane, in memory of the drowned men, to protect the island from another fishing disaster. Single lives had been lost before but never ten men all in one go. Trawlers were usually crewed by four, maybe five. That there had been so many aboard one boat was unnecessary, maybe even dangerous. It must have been a time when we were more desperate for fish.

That harbour cross always nagged at me; I didn’t like it. It was ugly and ostentatious. A contradiction.

‘Not a man has died on the boats since that cross went up,’ Diana Crane liked to boast to whoever would listen, which meant that it was nothing but a charm to appease a magpie god, no different from a rabbit’s foot, or a hag stone, or the stroke of the mane of a black-haired virgin.

I don’t know how long I was lost to these reflections, but when Margaritte spoke, it felt as though I had been in a deep sleep and she was pulling me to its surface.

‘The cross wasn’t put there to stop bad things happening,’ she told me.

I leapt up from the table, red wine splashing across the cards. How did she know what I’d been thinking? My hands went to my scalp, as if I might stop her reaching in and seeing more.

‘The cross was put there to keep a story straight,’ she said. No more tears. She was dry-eyed and deadly serious. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

I shook my head.

‘Trust your instincts,’ she instructed.