Fiona was silent, calculating. Her own Stuart was thirty-nine this year. Already on his second marriage, the one they hoped might stick, though they’d liked Joanne very much. “Thirty-one,” she brought out. “I think he must be thirty-one.” She stopped, trying to take it in. Then, “What’s he doing back here?”

Gavin, coming into the room, shrugged. “I know no more than you,” he said, which was absurd given that he was the one telling her the news. “Ross saw him on the ferry this morning, coming over from Oban.”

Fiona allowed herself to relax a little at this. “Well, if it was only Ross! Are we to take his word for everything now? He’d barely know his own wife if she was standing beside him.”

“He spoke to him,” Gavin said, leaning against the doorframe. “Ross spoke to Tommy. There were only the two of them on the ferry. You know how Ross is, seeing a stranger, especially this time of year. Went up and introduced himself. Asked Tommy if he was on holiday.”

“And Tommy—he said who he was?” Fiona said.

“Aye. Though Ross said he’d worked it out already, soon as he got closer, before Tommy even spoke.”

Fiona couldn’t explain why she suddenly felt hot and cold all over. “Ross is all talk,” she said. Then, as another thought occurred to her, “He might be lying. The stranger.”

Gavin did that frown of his she hated, and which he seemed to reserve especially for her; it wasn’t contemptuous, Gavin was too gentle for that, but his look of utter bafflement felt worse, as though he was still amazed, after all this time, at the silly things she said. “Now why on earth would someone lie about a thing like that?”

Fiona had no answer for this. If there was one thing she’d learned from the Baird tragedy, it was that people acted in ways that could not be explained, that sometimes could barely even be imagined. “But why come back now?”

“I expect he’s visiting Malcolm.”

“Malcolm hasn’t seen him in years.”

“Still, family’s family.”

Fiona thought, but did not say, that ‘family’ might have a more complicated meaning for Tommy Baird than it did for the rest of them.

Gavin stomped through to the kitchen and Fiona heard him clattering about, making tea. “I’ll have a cup too,” she called, not holding out high hopes of receiving one; he was getting deafer by the year and he didn’t make one for her routinely anymore. Other women her age joked about having trained their husbands up nicely, but with Fiona it seemed to have gone the other way.

However, a few minutes later he did bring two mugs through, placing hers, a little sloppily, on the table beside her before he settled into his own armchair by the fire.