‘You know who I am?’

‘Aye.’ He walks over to his chair and sits down. Leaving me standing in the centre of the room. ‘Folk from the village bring me food, news. The women mostly.’ A scowl. ‘Charlie, if I’m unlucky.’

‘I thought you were dead. They said you drowned at sea.’

He lets out a sudden roar that I recognise as laughter only when I see that fleeting grin again. ‘So they say. But that’s just a story. And stories can be dangerous, girl. Mostly for those telling them.’ Dark, almost black eyes stare at me from under bushy grey eyebrows. ‘Or writing them.’

My gaze keeps sliding back to the table, the gun and the blood. ‘Why did you change your name?’ I ask, skirting closer to those questions I really want to ask.

He cocks his head, stretches out his legs. ‘It was the name my mother gave me as a child. I wanted it back.’

‘But surely Andrew was—’

‘Not Andrew.’ He’s impatient again. ‘Sonny.’

‘That’s not what I meant. I’m asking—’

He makes a low growl in his throat like an animal, and I snap my mouth shut, take two steps back.

‘You really want to know why?’

I try not to cringe. I try instead to think of the young man standing alone in a grassy meadow in front of a hill. ‘Yes.’

There’s a pause. Long and far from silent. Above us, the rain drums and rattles against the rusty roof. When he looks at me again, his cold scrutiny makes me shiver. ‘Have you ever been asked to swallow a lie, girl? To stomach a secret so rotten, that the only way you can keep it down is to become someone else? To pretend it’s not inside you?’

And I want to say yes. I want to say yes so badly I say nothing.

He snorts and turns back to the fire. ‘They told you I drowned at sea because lies – stories – are like sandbags.’ A flash of lightning through the only window lights the room bright white. He doesn’t even flinch. ‘You need to keep stacking them up, over and over, until eventually there’s none left.’ A disconcerting flash of teeth. ‘And the water comes in anyway.’

A sudden and terrible suspicion strikes me. And at once I’m so utterly certain of this realisation that has come out of nowhere, out of nothing, that I retreat backwards again, my heart suddenly battering itself against my bones.

‘You’re not Robert.’

I flinch from the roar of his laughter; that hard, joyless bark.

‘You’re Kenny Campbell. You’re Isla’s husband.’

He rears up from his chair with such speed, such fury, I let out a shriek, stagger backwards against the door.

‘Kenny Campbell left this island because he couldn’t – wouldn’t – keep a secret so rotten it infected his blood, his dreams, his own wife,’ he roars. ‘My name is Sonny. And you’ll use it.’

‘I’m sorry.’ And I marvel that I manage to say anything at all.