‘Stop hotching, Calum.’

He freezes, and then grins wide enough to show the whole beach a mouthful of cheese and bread. ‘Sorry, Daddy.’

‘There’s another meeting in the pub tonight,’ Mary says.

‘You’re joking.’

‘Afraid not. Fiona told me first thing in the shop.’

‘For God’s sake. Meetings about bloody meetings! It’s not as if most of us don’t have at least a dozen other fucking things to be doing.’

Mary’s brow furrows as she looks pointedly towards Calum – although something darker passes over her eyes, and I know she’s thinking about Aberdeen.

‘Sorry, Calum. Daddy said the bad word you should never say.’ I glance at Mary. ‘Again.’

‘Bad Daddy,’ he says in delight.

‘Bad Daddy,’ Mary says, and then smiles. She strokes my cheek with the cool back of her hand. ‘You have to go.’

‘Aye, I know.’ I wedge my empty bottle in the sand. When we first arrived six months ago, I’d forgotten about this – everyone not just knowing everyone else’s business, but being an active participant in it. So be it. I brought Mary and Calum here because they’ve given me more love and peace than I’ve ever known. Or deserved. And so it will be worth it. It has to be.

Calum laughs when I reach over to grab him, shrieks when I toss him over my shoulder and start sprinting towards the sea.

‘Or … we could all make a run for it and swim to Canada!’

The shifting sand under my feet and the bite of crushed shells never fails to remind me of Mamaidh. The long days she’d take me paddling or rock fishing and mussel picking; the long adventure stories she’d later tell me by the fire over mugs of steaming chocolate. You’re my good boy. My wee warrior. Up until the day my father died. The day he went to sea and never came back.

Once, long before we were married, Mary and I got pissed on homemade gin, and had the kind of ill-advised conversation you can only ever have when you’re drunk and at the start of love. How many people have you had sex with? How many times have you cheated? What’s the worst thing that you’ve ever done? And even drunk, even already well past the start of love – because the first time I ever saw Mary it was over for me, even before she smiled that open, easy smile – I knew I could never tell her the truth. Not about that. I can no more tell Mary about the worst thing that I’ve ever done than the real reason I’ve come back here. Why I’ve dragged her and Calum to the end of the world. I haven’t even told her about the winter – she has no idea what the storm season on these islands is like. So dark and wild and endless that she’ll struggle to remember we even had days like these. Or why I’m looking forward to those storms in spite of dreading them. In spite of the nightmares that I always pretend are about something else.