I shouldn’t have done what I did to Charlie. Shouldn’t have said what I said. I look at the wet, grey sky, the fast-moving clouds. I’m fucking it up. I think of Mary’s You don’t need to own something to have it, Rob. You just need to believe that it’s yours. I’m fucking all of it up.

Mamaidh’s face changed as quickly as she did. She never stopped wearing black, so sometimes that face – no longer thin and pale, but bloated and criss-crossed with red veins – was all that I could see of her. The firelight making wounds in her skin. The lowball tumbler that always shook in her hand.

On nights when storms battered the sea against the beach, and the tide bell’s mournful toll echoed inside our cottage, she would stop drinking. She’d look at me for hours instead, and I’d wait for her rage, partly in hope of an end to those unblinking stares.

But I kept my promise. I never told.

And now I have.

Ghosts are just unfinished business. Unspoken truths. Guilt hiding under rocks, inside rabbit holes. They don’t need to follow you because they are you.

There’s a noise. Loud like a roar. Not from the beach or the sea, but inland and south, beyond the cemetery. When a group of people come running from the direction of Sid a’ Choin Mhòir moments later, I stand up, squint to see what they’re running from. But the rain has turned the southwest of the island into mist.

The dig. It has to be. I start running too, even though the grass has become slick with rain and the boggy ground untrustworthy. A welcome excitement grips me, one that’s forgotten everything else, and that’s incentive enough to keep running.

It takes too long to reach the narrow glen. I splash my way along it, towards shouts growing louder. Behind me, people are returning, laid low with rucksacks and rolls of tarpaulin.

Tòrr Dìseart is crowded with people, scurrying left and right like mice. I climb the ridge slowly – nothing can stop you like wet peat if it has a mind to – and once I make it to the top, I see Jaz standing a few feet away, handing out rubber tyres to a line of drenched archaeologists.

‘What is it?’ I shout, watching them run with those tyres towards the long trench closest to the cemetery, on the edge of the main excavated barrow.

Jaz turns in impatience, then grins wide when he recognises me. The first day I visited the dig months ago, I told him what I knew about the island’s history, and in return, he spent hours showing me around the staked-out trenches and plans for excavation. He might be a mainlander and only eighteen, but I know he feels it the same as me: the pull of this land like no other.

‘We found something!’ he shouts over the wind and the rain and the urgency of those rushing to cover the trenches with tarpaulin. He waves an arm out towards the edge of the trench, where the head of the dig – a Professor Something-or-other who hasn’t once given me the time of day – is crouched down and gesticulating wildly.