I get up, seized suddenly with purpose again, with hope.

‘Maggie.’

I turn, slap a startled hand against my chest.

Charlie looks tired, his ruddy face grey and stubbled white. ‘It was a good thing you just did. Thank you.’ There are dark shadows under his eyes as he glances down at the photo in my hands.

I thrust it at him, feeling vaguely ashamed. ‘It was the right thing, that’s all.’

He doesn’t reply, but he looks down at it for a few seconds before swinging an open rucksack off his shoulder and pushing the photo inside.

‘You going to Will?’ He doesn’t look up.

‘Yes. Is he okay?’

Charlie sighs – an exhausted, shaky sigh that makes me feel uneasy, back on unsafe ground.

‘I can’t keep lying to you,’ he says. ‘I can’t keep telling you the truth mixed with so many lies it may as well not be true at all.’

He reaches into his rucksack and brings out a wide wooden box.

‘Charlie …’ I realise that I’m shaking my head, backing away from him towards the bluff. ‘No more.’

But he holds it out to me until I take it.

‘It belonged to Robert,’ Charlie says, when I don’t ask. ‘I found it here, years ago. Inside one of these old burrows.’

I look down at the box. There are three words etched clumsily across its lid in what must be Gaelic. Tha mi duilich. That sense of creeping unease has become paralysing; I can’t do anything but read those words, over and over.

‘Open it, Maggie.’ Charlie’s voice sounds strange, changed.

The hinges of the box’s lid squeak enough to make me wince. Inside are two black bags. The larger is heavy and made of tightly woven canvas. I hold my breath as I pull out the object inside. It’s a Y-shaped metal frame attached to a flat black rubber band. A slingshot. I glance at Charlie as I set it and the box on the ground, and take out the smaller bag, velveteen-soft and rattling. I pull its drawstring wide with still shaking fingers, spill the contents out into my hand. Half a dozen pink quartz stones. Just the right size to fit into the slingshot’s cloth pocket. The same planes and sharp edges as the pendant I can feel pressing against my bruised breast-bone. And my heart – the heart that stopped beating less than one day ago – starts drumming so hard and so fast that I let out a gasp, drop the bag and the stones onto the ground.

‘Maggie.’

I shake Charlie’s hands off, back up against the bluff. When my knees finally buckle, I’m glad to give up trying to stand.

‘Maggie!’

I think of that day on Big Beach with Charlie at the beginning of spring when the island was coming alive again, just like I was. You found it here, you know. On this beach. We found you down by the east bluffs, holding that piece of quartz like it was a nugget of gold.