I tried to be Scottish. To ignore it. Focus on talking to Jim, finding out what really happened. He couldn’t have done it. The more I thought about it, the more I had a feeling that there was something missing in this story.

The door was locked, though the jeep was there. My T-shirt stuck to my back with sweat and rain; I looked like I’d been licked by a big dog. I thought about sheltering under his wheelbarrow, but if he found me there like that, he’d think I was even more unhinged than he already did. So I sat on a pile of splintered logs, letting the rain soak in, running a hand up my one-day stubble. Leg-logs.

My shivers were coming thick and fast by the time I spotted Jim a mile or so along the valley, a single vertical charcoal stroke. He filled out as he came nearer; shoulders next to his ears, hands in his pockets. Wearing the rain as a cloak. And I knew exactly the point at which he saw me – his pace wound almost to a halt and he walked twice as slowly towards the house.

He stopped a few metres away. ‘What do you want?’ His voice was grainy. The line between his eyes had deepened and set like dried, cracked mud.

I’d waited all this time and I didn’t know what to say. He stood still. A raindrop fell off my nose.

‘Fine,’ Jim said, brittle, and unlocked his door. He shut it behind him.

The rain crumbled over the far hills and kept coming. I tipped my head back, opened my mouth. Rain on my tongue, the back of my throat, my lungs. I wanted it to fill me up, seep through my bones until I was nothing but water, until I melted into the grass. Evaporating, falling again. Rising, falling.

I heard a click behind me. The door was open an inch.

He was sitting at the table, scratching the wood and looking fixedly at his fingernail. I stood in the middle of the room, rain falling off my hair onto the floor. It smelled of burnt toast in here.

‘Turn around,’ he said.

Pins shot down my legs and into the concrete. His expression was locked down. I swivelled around on the spot very slowly to face the fireplace, my breath sewn up.

This was it, then. I almost willed it, for my neck to be met with the cold edge of a knife, the imprint of a rifle barrel, to prove my stupid hopes wrong. Because I deserved it. I deserved everything I got. But when he stood and stepped closer behind me, he did something else entirely.

He took off my jacket, peeling it from my arms. The hem of my top lifted up, my back exposed to the air. Fingers at the hooks of my bra, which loosened just slightly at the front as he undid it. Christ. I hadn’t been expecting this, now.