As they stood at the top of the main tower, overlooking the beauty of Loch Ness below, Elle briefly closed her eyes. She felt the rough stone of the castle beneath her hands, her imagination trying to capture how it must have all looked in its prime, and piecing together the history they had heard about in the auditorium before they reached the castle itself. Elle still struggled to imagine the brutality that seemed to go hand in hand with the history of these places—the wars, the raids, the slaughter. Strangely, though, other than at the battlefield earlier, she hadn’t felt any real prickling of anything sinister. It all felt so calm and peaceful. Maybe bad vibes washed away after a while; after all, they were only a fraction of time in a very long history. Maybe that old saying, ‘Time heals all wounds’ was true—even for castles.

‘What do you think happened between our grandmothers?’ Elle asked Aila after a while.

‘I dunno,’ Aila replied with a small shrug, dragging her attention away from a pair of Italian backpackers, who were snapping photos nearby. ‘For a long time I dinna ken we even had any relations in Australia. She never talked about your gran.’

‘It doesn’t make any sense. Both sides of the family seem big on the whole “family is everything” vibe,’ Elle said, using her fingers to punctuate. ‘What would cause two sisters to have such a huge falling-out?’

‘Did your granny not give you any clue?’

‘She won’t say a word,’ Elle said with a frustrated shake of her head.

‘You mean, didn’t say a word?’ Aila said, giving her an odd look.

Elle’s gaze flittered away uncomfortably. ‘Yes, of course that’s what I meant,’ she said quickly with a little laugh.

‘There are times when Granny goes off in her own little world,’ Aila said after a few minutes. ‘It does no good to try to correct her when she calls me by other people’s names or starts talking to me about people she knew from the old days, so I just let her go. Sometimes you can piece together things. There was this one time, though, that she got talking about my granddad. She was really worked up about it. I have no idea who she thought I was, but it must have been someone she was very close to.’

‘What was she worked up about?’

‘She kept saying she was sorry and started crying something terrible, before she said something about “the poor wee bairn”.’

‘What do you think she was talking about?’