As I turn, the wind kicks up. A wall of air buffets one of my shoulders from the front and then shifts to shove against my back, like I’m a sailboat making a turn. The wind nudges me forward to the lane. I widen my stance, but the hill is steep here and the gust is incredibly strong.

My breath comes quickly, with panic or exhilaration, I’m not sure which. They’re indistinguishable at this point. Has it found me, then? Has the island chosen me?

Maybe this really is why I was picked, Nina No-one of Nowhere, to move here among the select few. All those dark suspicions I’ve harbored from the beginning of my marriage, wondering whether I was a placeholder bride, whether Hugh picked me up and carried me home as a convenient excuse for not being here seven years ago, but maybe it wasn’t him at all.

Maybe Lute chose me as a sacrifice.

It feels like truth.

Another gust, and this one roars in my ear, quiets to a whisper, screams again. I clap my hands over my hair, my ears, holding myself in place, my feet unsteady on the rocky ground, as I make my way around the corner of the tearoom.

When my boots hit the lane, the wind stops. Gone, never there, and all the world is still. I feel weightless.

Matthew Clare stands in the lane, ten feet away, staring at me as if we’d arranged to meet here, as if he’d been expecting me to join him for hours. Or longer. Seven years.

“I was looking for…” My voice trails out.

I can hear the sea battering the beach, the screech of gulls dancing in the wind, the goats out on the heath.

“Elsie,” he offers. “I checked. She’s not at home.”

He nods to the cottage with its bare little window boxes. Her pale green door is ajar.

“It was like that when I got here,” he says. “I had a peek. Nobody there. She seems to have had a rummage around her kitchen. Several of the drawers were open.”

“That doesn’t sound good.” I take one step closer. “Should we…?”

The we seems to affect him. A lightness comes into his expression.

“Should we what, Nina?”

My name. Oh my God, the sound it makes. All this time calling me Lady Treadway—he shouldn’t be allowed to say it. It’s too dangerous, the way he drapes it over his tongue before releasing it.

He stands so still, his feet rooted into the gravel of the lane, hands relaxed by his side for once, fingers hanging open like he’s surrendered after a fight. His eyes on mine. He looks like an illustration in a children’s book for “brave.”

The wind brought me here, Lute wanted me right here, standing in front of Matthew. A deep sense of rightness ripples through me.