When I fed Mum all those pills, one after another; when I watched her die – it was my choice. And I forgive myself for making it. Just as I forgive myself for never seeing either of us as anything more than a diagnosis; more than a few words in a file or on a prescription. I think instead of her eyes always bright, smile always wide, as if she knew something everyone else only wanted to.

And then it’s easy, so easy, to reach into the neck of my mac and pull the chain free over my head. To rub the cool quartz of the pendant between nearly numb finger and thumb. To lean over the railings and drop it into the water, its long silver links catching the light before disappearing under the waves of the ferry’s wake. I reach into my pocket, take out that photo of a young man standing alone in a grassy meadow in front of a hill. Tall and broad, arms folded over his chest. A thick brown beard, deep-set eyes, and a stoic frown.

‘Goodbye, Robert.’

I let the photo go. Watch it flutter and flap, buoyed briefly by the wind before it vanishes into the same waves. I’m not Robert Reid. I’m not Andrew MacNeil. I don’t believe in talismans or Norse myths. I don’t believe that people are cursed. I don’t believe that they deserve to be.

I’m not my bipolar. And I’m not my mother. I’m not Maggie MacKay. I’m not the Maggie Anderson who lived in London, pretending to be happy with so little.

I’m not even the person who stood on the deck of this boat three months ago. Who stood on a beach and told Charlie that she’d always been afraid to be happy. That she didn’t know how to live in a moment instead of a whole life. Because she died. And I was born.

I look west, as those headlands and summits slowly disappear behind wreaths of sea mist and sun. That has been its gift to me. This thin place. This beautiful and wild place that will forever be a part of me.

It’s never too late. Because the end is never the end. There will always, always be time.

To love, to forgive. To live.

EPILOGUE

End of September 1993

Robert

We’re all guilty of something, my father always said. But the biggest sin is fear. And never facing it. That was not his sin, of course. Only mine. This morning, the sun is high. It lights up the occasional sprays of spindrift in silver-white sparks. From this height, the ocean looks endless like the sky. Blue and quiet. But the storms are coming. I can see them in the spray blown from the crests of waves and in the scattered whitecaps out towards the horizon. In the slow steady leaching of light from the sky, a little earlier each day. And I can feel them in the air and against my skin. A prickle. A shiver of old fear.