‘Suicide,’ I say. ‘Robert meant suicide.’

Charlie nods once. His hands are clasped so tightly they’ve turned white.

‘He needed help, Charlie! There’s no way he was in his right mind. Not when he killed Lorne MacDonald, or when he decided he wanted to kill himself. And instead you said okay? You didn’t tell the police, you didn’t tell a doctor? You locked him up for a week, and then you just said okay?’

And the horror, the outrage, that I feel isn’t only for Robert, I know that. It’s as much for Mum and her own myths and thin places. And it’s as much for me, pulled forever in two directions, neither of which I wanted to call home.

‘He would have gone insane in prison, Maggie. Or in some hospital. A bad thing happened to him when he was too young, and he could never get over it, no one helped him get over it.’ Charlie looks at me. ‘Just going back to the mainland would have … He needed this place, this land, this sky, even this sea. It was a part of him. It’s a part of all of us.’ He lets out a long breath. ‘I wanted to help him. And that’s the truth. The truth I never told anyone because he’d just murdered an eight-year-old boy.’

‘If you did that – if you allowed that – then what Kenny said was right.’ There’s a dull throb inside my throat. ‘Robert was murdered. You murdered him.’

The look Charlie gives me is suddenly fierce, hot. ‘Robert Reid wanted to atone for what he’d done. He wanted to be punished. To be forgiven.’

‘And did you tell everyone else what he wanted to do? Or did you just let him do it?’

‘I told everyone. Of course I did. I told them everything that he had told me, about his real name, about Ardshader, about why he’d done what he did to Lorne.’ Charlie looks down at his hands. ‘We had to decide.’

Everything inside me goes quiet. Even my heartbeat. ‘Oh my God.’ I remember Will’s Normally, no one can even agree on who’s buying the first round after the bells without voting by committee. ‘You voted.’

Charlie winces a little, looks away.

‘You voted to kill him.’

‘We voted to help him die. It’s not the same.’ But there’s no fire in his words this time. No conviction.

And my outrage, my righteousness, turns to ash in my mouth too. Because I’m inside that silver thread of light stretching thin across the floor, listening to the rattle of Mum’s breath. The rattle of that pill bottle inside my fist. Make it go away, Maggie.

‘We’re a community,’ Charlie says. ‘We’re a family.’ He draws his hands into fists again.

‘Everyone said yes?’ And I loathe myself a little for both the hope and the anger I can hear in the question.

‘Everyone but Kenny,’ Charlie says. ‘For the MacDonalds – Alec, at any rate – it was about revenge, but for everyone else, it was for justice.’ He gives me that pleading look again, desperate to be understood. ‘And what’s justice but the middle ground between compassion and revenge?’