“Where is Heather?” Tommy said, looking past Malcolm towards the kitchen, as though she might actually be waiting there. And Malcolm realized with a lurch like rising sickness that Tommy knew nothing, knew absolutely nothing, that they had been cut off from one another so completely that Tommy might as well have been laid beneath the earth all these years, to now suddenly reappear, to come back from the dead and stand calmly in Malcolm’s hallway, brushing off the dirt and asking about Heather.

No way to soften it, not for either of them. “She died,” Malcolm said. “Almost six years ago now.” The words weren’t so worn around the edges that they didn’t hurt him. He had made a final attempt, after Heather’s death, to contact Tommy, but found that the only number he had, which was for Tommy’s cousin Henry, no longer worked. He had been too bound up in his own grief to feel much dismay at the time. Anyway, he had given Tommy up long ago.

“A stroke,” he told Tommy now. “Two, in fact. Both bad. She survived a few years after the first, but then she had another.” Then he added, because Tommy was staring at him without speaking, “She was still herself though. Right up to the end.”

“But—she must have been young,” Tommy said, and Malcolm was surprised to see him stricken like this. Because what had Heather been to Tommy in the end?

“Aye,” Malcolm said. “Too young.”

Tommy was silent.

Malcolm remembered himself and said, “Come on into the kitchen. You’ll have a cup of tea?”

“Yes. Please.”

“Put your bag down there for now,” Malcolm said, nodding towards the boot rack by the door, and Tommy did as he was told before following Malcolm through to the small kitchen.

How long would he be staying? Malcolm wondered, trying not to feel panicked. He’d have to stay two nights, at least; there wasn’t a ferry back to the mainland until Friday. The spare room was in a state—full of dust, with books and clutter piled up to the ceiling. Malcolm tried to think what Heather would do. Nothing could ever fluster his wife. She would tell him to take it one step at a time and make the lad some tea. So while Tommy sat at the table, Malcolm steadied himself with the familiar routine of filling the kettle, getting out mugs and the tea bags, fetching the milk from the fridge. He was grateful for the noise as the old kettle came to the boil; impossible to have any kind of conversation over the top of that.