ALSO BY
REBECCA WAIT

The Followers

The View on the Way Down

OUR FATHERS

Our fathers sinned, and are no more;
and we bear their iniquities.
—LAMENTATIONS 5:7

If she had survived, Katrina would have said what people always say: that it had been a day like any other. That everything was normal. She might have said, too, how strange it was that you only noticed normality after it ended, that by its nature it was invisible as long as you were in it.

It was March, and outside the sky was washed white like the bleached wood the tide left on the beach. She sent the boys to collect it so they could dry it out and use it as firewood, but some days it was hard to get warm. Spring came late to Litta. They had many days like this, of piercing cold and little colour. Sometimes the isolation of the place appalled her. Even on the clearest days, you could not see the mainland, thirty miles distant to the east. To their west, the Atlantic stretched out blankly, nothing but a lighthouse standing between them and Canada. When they’d first moved to the island, Katrina had found herself feeling as muted as the landscape during these endless winters. But John had said that she’d get used to it, and she supposed she had.

On this particular Tuesday in March, the sea had been rough all day, hurling itself against the rocks in an explosion of foam, then sliding back to gather force before it surged forward again. The wind was up already, laying the grasses flat across the machair and buffeting the sheep on the cliffs. It would grow in strength as the afternoon wore on, but on the island their houses had to be coming down around their ears before they were willing to call it a storm.

The boys had arrived home from school and were playing round the side of the house. Beth was in her playpen, occupied for the time being with Joe Bear and her cloth book, so Katrina could move around with relative freedom as she completed the housework. She had been dusting the skirting boards, because John’s brother and his wife were coming round the following evening, and although Katrina always kept a clean house, she never noticed the skirting boards until she tried to look at each room critically, as if through the eyes of somebody else. John minded if things weren’t perfect when Malcolm and Heather came, though you would think with family it would matter less.