‘Calum,’ she says finally. ‘Why don’t you sit over there on Daddy’s stool and drink your milk before it gets cold, okay? Ask Daddy to help you up.’

I lift him onto the stool and ruffle his hair before walking back over to Mary.

‘What are we doing down here, Robert?’ She’s being very careful with me. I can tell she wants to shout, but she won’t.

‘It’s safer.’ I can’t quite meet her eye.

‘It’s just a storm. Nothing will happen to us inside the house, you know that.’

I can’t tell her how afraid I am. The dread certainty that we can’t stay upstairs while thunder rattles the windows and lightning tries to strike its way down through us and into the boggy ground. While the storm and sea lash at the walls trying to get in, and the sheep cry together in fear. Mary doesn’t know about Andrew MacNeil or Àrd Shiadair. She doesn’t know about the storm. I told her once about my parents – enough that she understood I wanted the very opposite for Calum. The kind of childhood I’d never had. But I never told her anything more.

‘I told you,’ I mutter. ‘Storms are different here.’

I think of her accusing me months ago of having a persecution complex about this place. Maybe I should tell her that the ewe was butchered. Maybe I should tell her about that someone up on the ridge behind the cemetery this morning. Watching me and the sheep. Or about Jimmy loitering in the dark outside our barn.

She narrows her eyes and takes hold of my hands, even though they’re still streaked with dried blood. Mary’s never been squeamish, never afraid to confront anything. Maybe that’s why I was drawn to her in the first place. ‘Rob. Please. It’s cold. The boy needs his bed.’

When I don’t answer, her fingers tighten enough to sting. She draws back, traps me inside her gaze, her disapproval. And still unspoken, always unspoken, is You said it would be better here.

In Aberdeen, the darkness hadn’t just descended, it had crashed down on top of me like a tsunami. And while I was trying to surface, it swept me so far and so fast that when I finally stopped, I hardly knew who I was any more, never mind where. Mary is who saved me. Who dragged me back to land. And I could never explain to her where it had come from, what seismic event had caused it. Because there had been none. Just a deep, hollow hole inside me that wanted – needed – to come home.

‘Fiona said something bad’s going on between you and Charlie, but he wouldn’t tell her or Alec what. Charlie’s been nothing but nice to us, Rob, and you promised me. You promised you’d try.’

‘I know.’

And that’s why I can never tell her any of it. She won’t understand about the land. About the Sjóvættir and the Landvættir. She won’t understand why, after I watched my father’s boats leave at pink dawn, I marched to Àird Èinis. The rage – the fury – inside me growing bigger, wilder when every shot, every stone, was repelled by the metallic no of the lamp room’s steel cage. She won’t understand that truth abides in thin places. And some things that should never be possible can never be undone. That the weight of will, of want – of hate – can be bigger than rocks inside a slingshot; bigger than glass or metal or might. Or no.