‘Daddy! Daddy! Mammy says hurry up!’

Calum’s cheeks are bright as he crests the bluff. He’s always looked more like Mary than me: fair and small, with his smile so wide and ready. I wonder if I ever smiled that way.

Mary has already set up a picnic on the beach. Tràigh Shearrag is more sheltered than Tràigh Mhòr further west, but most days a narrow funnel of wind throws the sand into devils. Today though, all is still. Enough that I can feel the calmness move inside me as I climb down onto the dunes. Pushing against the walls of my worry.

‘Sit, the pair of you,’ Mary smiles. ‘Thought I was going to have to eat all this myself.’

She’s made sandwiches and pies; packed plastic plates and beakers. She takes a beer from the cool bag and passes it to me. Her hair is loose and wild, the way she knows I love it. She’s made a far better effort than I have, and guilt makes me smile harder as I take the beer and sit down.

‘You’re looking particularly gorgeous today, Mrs Reid.’

She seems startled for a moment, and then she laughs, her cheeks going pink. Mary never wanted to leave Aberdeen. Never wanted to come here. She’s an east coast lass through and through; speaks Scots, English and some Doric, but not one word of Gaelic. A city girl too. Sometimes she tells me that I’ve brought her to the very end of the world. And yet she came without question.

‘Kenny! Kenny!’ Calum yells, waving both arms as he chases after the now passing Unity. Calum doesn’t want to be a farmer either. He wants to be a fisherman. And the thought of that makes my blood boil and run cold at the same time.

You will get on that boat, boy. Dark thunderous brows and sea-grey eyes. Brown-leather skin and ruddy, stubbled cheeks. I’ve always seen my father in my dreams. Heard him. Felt the sour heat of his disappointment; the sting of his belt or the snood-hooks of his sma’ lines. On nights when I don’t, I still wake up – panicked and vaguely bereft, even though it should only be a relief.

It’s not that sly bastard Kenny Campbell who grins and waves back at Calum; he’s only a hunched silhouette inside the Unity’s wheelhouse. It’s the boat’s other skipper, Charlie MacLeod. Always with an easy swagger, an easier smile, as if nothing has ever bothered him in his entire life. Maybe it hasn’t; maybe behind his winks and grins and quick laughter there is nothing hidden at all.

‘Charlie!’ Calum cries. ‘Charlie!’

Mary is waving now too.

‘Come away, Calum,’ I say. ‘Sit down and eat the lunch your mum’s slaved over.’

‘It’s fine,’ Mary says as Calum trudges back to drop down onto the sand.

The Unity disappears into the shadow of the headland as we eat in comfortable silence, Calum barely able to sit still and eat his sandwiches in anticipation of the Kinder eggs he knows Mary will have packed into the hamper.