My sigh is very loud in the quiet. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t go tonight. What if everyone—’

‘Ach, don’t mind Jaz. In a few days, they’ll all have moved on to something else. That’s how it goes.’ She walks over to the fridge and pulls out a bottle of wine. ‘Let’s have a drink, I’ll make us some food, and then we can go downstairs to the pub. Have a lot more drinks.’

Fraser scrambles to his feet as he looks at me shyly. ‘Are you from Glasgow? Did you come on a boat or a plane? Do you live in a house like Jaz or—’

‘Give Maggie a chance to answer,’ Kelly says.

‘I came from London in England,’ I say. ‘And I got three trains, a plane, a bus, and then a boat.’

Fraser’s eyes go wide. ‘No way.’

‘And I’m living in your mum’s blackhouse.’

‘No way.’

‘Yes way,’ Kelly laughs. ‘Now, I need you to tidy away your Lego and go wash your hands for tea, okay?’

Fraser visibly deflates, but heads back to the rug with a muttered, ‘Okay.’

‘He’s very cute.’

‘Yeah,’ Kelly says, rolling her eyes and pushing a glass of wine across the counter towards me. ‘You can say that because you haven’t witnessed the bedtime tantrums or the PTSD-inducing three a.m. wake-up calls.’ She starts filling a pan with water. ‘Pasta okay? Carbonara?’

‘Of course. Can I help?’

‘You’re all right. Although pasta and a stir-in sauce is pretty much the summit of my cooking skills.’ She glances at me over her shoulder. ‘Sorry if this is rude, but you look a bit weird. Has something happened?’

And because I need to tell someone, I recount my conversation with Charlie, and what I found on the Scotland’s People website.

‘That’s … nuts, Maggie,’ she says when I finish. ‘There actually was an Andrew MacNeil? I mean, that’s just … that’s nuts, Maggie.’ But when she turns round there’s something in her expression suddenly that I can’t read. Something closed.

‘Well. There was a man from Ardshader called Andrew who changed his name and moved here, at least.’

‘So, what does that mean?’ She puts a lid on the pot, tops up our glasses, and sits down on a breakfast bar stool. ‘I was going to ask you tonight – if you thought it was true? You know, you being …’ she waves her hands, half-shrugs, ‘reincarnated?’

‘It’s … complicated.’ I sit down, give her a tight half-smile.

‘My dad used to say that believing in things like ghosts or heaven or reincarnation, all that, was just a fear of dying,’ Kelly says.

‘Your parents, were they still here in ’99 – you know, when I came here? Did they ever mention—’

‘No. We moved to North Uist around ’95, ’96.’

‘So they would have been living here when Robert Reid was alive, right? It’s just … Charlie said Robert lived in the blackhouse.’

‘The Blackhouse?’

When I nod, her face betrays surprise, even shock, but underneath there’s that something else, pinched and still closed.