Tommy seemed to take this the wrong way, growing immediately awkward. “You know, you could still go out to the bar. I don’t mind. Please don’t stay in just because of me.”

“No, I . . .” It was strange, Malcolm thought, how much time he spent trying to put Tommy at ease when he was so little at ease himself. “I’m quite happy staying in. I just meant that it can be boring if you’re not used to it. Not used to such a quiet life.”

“I think I’ve only ever wanted a quiet life.”

“Well then,” Malcolm said. “You’ve come to the right place.”

And even this comment, innocuous as it was, seemed to go too near something dangerous, to touch too closely on Tommy’s motives for being here, which were still a mystery to Malcolm. The simplest conversation with his nephew seemed to be riddled with traps.

“I suppose so,” Tommy said, getting up. “Well. Goodnight then.”

Perhaps Tommy really did just want a holiday, Malcolm thought after his nephew had left the room. Perhaps he had simply come here to get away for a few days, and it really was no more complicated than that.

In bed that night, he thought of his friends gathered together in the bar and wondered if they’d talked about him and Tommy. He assumed they had. Or maybe not about Malcolm himself—out of loyalty, they would avoid discussing him if they could—but he knew how likely it was they had returned to the old unresolved problem of John. Everyone had come up against it at the time and they continued to come up against it now. There was no getting around it.

Malcolm remembered how often Heather had said it, how she had repeated that old question: Why did he do it? She had blamed herself bitterly for not seeing any warning signs, as if John had somehow been her responsibility, though she wasn’t even related to him. She wasn’t the one who’d grown up with him.

Other people had asked Malcolm too—almost everyone on the island at one stage or another during the aftermath—as though he had some secret knowledge, as though he had somehow been party to it. Oh, nobody accused him, he knew that; nobody blamed him. But they watched him and he felt it. They trod quietly around him, waiting for the moment when he would choose to share his knowledge. Why did John do it? Everybody had liked John. Malcolm must tell them why he had done it. Had he lost his mind?

“He loved them,” Heather said. “We all saw it. He adored Katrina and those children.”