There was no opportunity for John to approach her on her own in the pub that night, because Katrina wasn’t the kind of girl confident enough to go up to the bar to get a round in like the men, and tended to rely on others to fetch her drinks. John waited instead until she was on the edge of the group of her colleagues, only five of them left by that point, and then he simply walked up to her.

“Do you mind me asking,” he began, “if that’s your natural hair colour?”

Katrina did mind him asking, although the rudeness of the question was partly allayed by the warmth of his manner.

“It is,” she said, not committing to a smile, but ready to be charmed, if he turned out to be charming.

“I’ve never seen such lovely dark-red hair,” he said. “It’s very striking.”

Mae, Katrina’s colleague, whom she had been chatting to up to this point, snorted and turned away to talk to the rest of the group, clearly deciding to leave them to it. Katrina wished she hadn’t, because she immediately felt awkward.

John, however, seemed pleased. He asked her about herself, and, upon eliciting that she worked at the Herald, said, “So I’d better watch what I say, hadn’t I? Else I might make it into print.”

“Hardly,” Katrina said. “I work for the business section.”

“A real career girl,” John said, smiling.

“Hardly,” Katrina said again, and then wondered if she’d forgotten all her other words.

“But a girl as pretty as you won’t be doing that for long,” John said. “Someone will come along and marry you. Or are you one of those modern women who don’t believe in marriage?”

“No,” Katrina said.

John was an accountant and had been living in Glasgow since he was eighteen and started his training. But he’d grown up on Litta, he said, in the southern Hebrides. The island was remote and beautiful, with fewer than a hundred residents.

And now he had Katrina’s attention. “That must have been amazing,” she said. She tried to picture it.

“It was,” John said. “A wonderful place to be a child—though as a teenager all I wanted was to get away. It was too isolated for me then. I feel differently now. I’d like to go back eventually. Bring up my own children there.”

“I’ve never been. Not to anywhere in the Hebrides.”

“You must,” he said with a new intensity. “There’s nowhere better.”

Somehow it was this that started it, the passion with which he began to describe his home and his childhood, this that won Katrina over more than anything else. She wanted to see it too: those empty windswept beaches, the sea crashing against the black rocks, the cliffs and moorland and hills, the gannets and seals and sheep.