‘Are you okay?’ The concern in his eyes is fierce. He reaches up a hand to touch my face, perhaps my hair, and then hesitates, curls it into a fist. ‘I was so fucking scared. When I saw you … when I saw what Mum had … I’m so sorry. I don’t know what I would have done if—’

‘I’m okay,’ I say, trying to smile and not even coming close to managing it.

‘She’s much worse than I thought. No wonder Euan has been stressed out. He’s probably been shitting himself that she was going to tell the truth, expose all their fucking lies.’ He shakes his head. Gives me a pleading look. ‘In her own fucked-up way, she was trying to protect me.’

‘I know.’

‘I’m so fucking sorry, Maggie.’

And this time he does touch my face. His fingers are warm. When he moves closer, he is all I can see and smell and feel. And I have to back away. I have to back away so fast and so far that I find myself inside the narrow hallway again, gripping hard at the kitchen doorframe.

The grief in Will’s eyes sharpens. ‘What’s wrong?’

I don’t know what to say. How to answer. How to tell him. That Cora was right to protect him. That once I was someone else. Once I was Robert Reid. Once I was Andrew MacNeil. His father. And because I’m resolved to see it, to confront it – to confront everything I want to run from, there’s no hiding from that. There’s no pretending that nothing has changed. Or that what Will and I have – this connection that I’ve never come close to having with anyone else – isn’t murky now. Knowing what I know – what I have no choice but to believe – will always make it murky. Wrong. I look at Will, and the love I feel for him is agonising. Impossible. ‘You’re Calum.’

He flinches, turns away from me to run his fingers through his already messy hair. His voice is furious, but so unsteady. ‘They came round last night, Charlie and Euan. They told me everything they’d already told you. That Mum … and I … were from Aberdeen. We’d never lived in Kenilworth; Mum never met Euan in Glasgow. That my father … my father was Robert Reid.’ His voice cracks briefly as he looks down at the table, and I recognise the photo that had been beside his bed: a young Cora standing next to a dark-haired man with Will’s eyes. ‘That’s mum’s brother, my fucking uncle. No wonder he crapped himself when I turned up on his doorstep in Balham.’ When he spins back to me, all that anger runs out of him and I want to hide from the way he looks at me. ‘Everyone lied to me. My whole life. My first memories of this island are of the Big Hoose and that’s it. I don’t remember anything else. I swear I would have told you if—’