“Are you going to tell me she means well?”

“No.”

“I’ll go,” Tommy said. “Tomorrow’s Saturday, isn’t it? The ferry will be here again. I’ll be gone first thing. I was going to go anyway.”

“No you weren’t,” Malcolm said. “And I don’t want you to.”

“Yeah, you said that,” Tommy said. “I heard. But you don’t mean it.”

“I do. You’ll always have a home here.”

He was astonished when Tommy put his head in his hands and started to cry.

4

Fiona managed to hold back the tears until she’d got the car going, and even then she only let a few escape her eyes and trickle down her cheeks. She’d always had a lot of self-control and she didn’t allow any noise to escape her, didn’t allow her face to crumple up pathetically, until she turned the bend in the road and Malcolm’s cottage was out of sight. She was embarrassed at herself, at the high-pitched sounds coming from her mouth, but at least there was nobody to witness it.

She was crying because she was so angry, she thought. Malcolm had no right. Anyone could see Tommy’s presence was doing no good here, just causing everyone—most of all himself—a lot of upset. All Fiona wanted was to help. But people never wanted her help. They threw it back in her face.

And what had Katrina been asking for except to be helped, except to be saved from herself? Why else would she have confided in Fiona of all people, not in Heather, to whom she was so much closer by then?

Fiona sped up, taking the narrow road much faster than usual, anxious to put space between herself and Malcolm’s cottage. But in driving home, she was also driving back to the track she’d once shared with Katrina and John, the house in which they had died. They had tainted everything. “Blood all over the walls,” Greg Brown had said, shaking in Fiona’s living room that day. Fiona hadn’t really believed it, not then. Thought there must have been some terrible mistake.

But even now, could you really say, really say with certainty, that Fiona had been wrong? What do any of us do in the end except what we believe is right at the time, without having all of the information, without knowing how things will turn out? We leap into the darkness with our only protection our idea of what is right, and who can ask more of us than that? We do our best, Fiona thought. I have always done my best.

And Katrina had put her in an impossible position.

Fiona took the bend sharply, turning west along the northern loop of the road. No one coming the other way, fortunately; she wasn’t sure she could have stopped in time.