I sit down on the second-from-last cellar step and look up at those stars, their glow dim and fading. Was this place meant as some kind of memorial? Or confession? Maybe even penance? Or was it like his vándr-varði: a talisman against ghosts? Because this forgotten, windowless, dark room – this is where Robert is; this is the place that he haunts.

I think of him looking out at the world from his meadow, unsmiling and inscrutable. I think of the Ardshader memorial and those mournful net curtains billowing in the breeze like ghosts. Fiona was right. To understand Robert’s life – his death – is to understand who he was. A boy – eventually a man – who believed that he’d caused those boats to sink, those men to die. A boy who’d been angry, who’d hated his father, and so had fired rocks at a one-hundred-foot-high lighthouse. Maybe Robert did believe that he’d broken that light on Aird Einish, or maybe it only mattered to him that he’d wanted to. Isn’t that what guilt amounts to, after all? Less what we do than what we want to do? What we know we would do?

Maybe I’ll never know how Mum knew about this place, about Andrew MacNeil. I can’t ask her. I will never be able to ask her. But I no longer have to dance to her tune either, and there’s liberation in that. Because it doesn’t matter any more. I was right all those weeks ago: the story has never been about Robert. It’s about me. Not the me that came to this island twenty years ago, schooled in another lie, another trick, just like those marked playing cards. Not even the me who saw a demon trying to climb into her mother’s coffin. But the me who sobbed as I shook all those pills out into my hand. The me who believed that living in the same house as Robert had to be a sign I was reincarnated, and not just coincidence in a tiny village. The me whose need to be absolved made her desperate to believe. Because I was taught to lie. And I was taught to believe it was the truth. And that’s something that a tortured and long-dead man can’t fix. Because it’s pathetic. And it’s time to stop.

When I phoned Gordon Cameron, it was only because I’d managed to convince myself that finding out the truth – about Mum, about Robert, about me – didn’t mean having to lose the happiness that I’ve found here. But there’s no denying the relief I felt behind the disappointment, the shame. I am not special. I am not absolved. I did not make the right choice.

And I am not the reincarnation of Andrew MacNeil. We are not the same. Or at least we don’t have to be. Guilt made Robert. Perhaps it even killed him. And maybe that’s the real reason I came here. To discover that I can live with mine.