I nod, annoyed that I’ve made my hurt at being excluded obvious.

‘And I … I just wanted to see how you were after Saturday night. You know, after …’

Somehow, I’d thought it would help. Telling someone. I thought it would release some of that terrible pressure that’s never stopped growing inside me; a gauge long past safe, long past red. But instead, telling Charlie has left a deep hole that hurts more, bleeds more, than any of my secrets ever did.

There’s shame too. Shame not just for the why but the all I told him. When I’m sober and the day is sunny, I don’t feel shadows behind me. It’s not bòcain that wait in the dark and the drink. It’s weakness. That scared, hurt wee boy who ruined my life. I hate Andrew. Every day I wish he’d died instead. That I’d been able to kill him. To smother the fear and hate and weakness inside him.

I close the kitchen door. ‘What I said to you, it stays between us.’

Charlie folds his arms. ‘Robert, I don’t—’

I lunge at him probably before either of us knows I’m going to. But it’s a relief: the anger that’s become a rolling boil; the almost involuntary need to do something about it. I grab him by the shirt, twist it tight inside my fists as I yank him towards me.

‘You ever tell anyone my name or what I said to you—’

‘A man’s business is his business,’ Charlie gasps, his face and neck turning an ugly puce. He tries to prise my fingers free, but I only twist tighter as I lean close enough to see my own spit on his cheek.

‘You tell anyone, I will kill you, Charlie.’

And then, because I realise I mean it; because I realise the poison in me – the shame, the boiling rage – means it, I let him go.

He staggers away from me, grabs his coat as he retreats to the mudroom and opens the front door. He only turns round again once he’s standing halfway along the path, the wind whipping his hair. And the fury in his eyes is easily a match for mine.

‘You’re an arsehole. You’re a fucking arsehole, Robert.’

*

I go to Àite Lurach. Even though the rain is still fierce and the skies over the Atlantic are stormy. Even though there’s little that’s lovely about the place in December. The meadow is boggy and colourless, the lochans choppy. But still, it calms me, dilutes the fog in my head. There’s a peace here. A kind of quiet that even a storm can’t disturb or destroy. Like those flat, impassive stones standing sentinel on the cliffs at Oir na Tìr. So tall they can block out the sun.

I climb the bluff almost to its windy summit. Stop at the large flat rock close to the bank and sit in its relative shelter. All around me is quiet. Thin, shivering roots hang down over every dark burrow, large or small, like beaded curtains over a doorway.