‘Jesus,’ she says. ‘I mean … I didn’t know that. That’s pretty fucking nuts too.’ She shakes her head. ‘I know that we lived here above the pub for the first year or so of running it. But I never knew who lived in the blackhouse before we did.’

‘D’you think you could ask them? How well they knew him?’

Kelly gets up and goes back to the hob. ‘I guess. I mean I can ask, but …’ She gives an almost theatrical shrug of her shoulders. ‘Don’t know how much use they’ll be. Dad’s got a memory like a sieve.’ She turns round again, and that shuttered look is gone. ‘What about your mum? I mean, you said she was with you – what did she think of it all? Did she believe it? Does she believe it?’

‘She died,’ I say, washing down the just with the last of my wine.

‘God, I’m sorry.’

I shake my head, look down at my hands. ‘Mum believed a lot of things. But the biggie was that she was psychic.’ Reflexive embarrassment mixes with anger. ‘That she could hear the voices of the dead. That she could predict the future. More often than not, hers. Or mine.’

Kelly leans against the kitchen island, her glass tipping unnoticed in her hand, the wine dangerously close to its lip. ‘What did you believe?’

‘When I was a kid? Her. Later?’ I can feel that tight smile pulling at my lips again. ‘Like I said, it’s complicated.’

She frowns. ‘But, the whole I died as Andrew and woke up as Maggie thing?’

‘It isn’t that uncommon. Lots of kids say – insist – that they’ve been reincarnated; it’s been widely documented across the world in all cultures and religions. They can recount names and places and memories that don’t belong to them. And then around eight years old, they forget. Sometimes they forget that they ever even had these “memories”. Nothing can be proved; the information is generally too vague, too small.’ I shrug. ‘I used to think it was like seeing ghosts. If you don’t believe in them, they just look like shadows. And then, later, I started thinking that if you did believe in them, maybe every shadow turned into a ghost.’

‘But, I mean, if Robert Reid was Andrew MacNeil, that means he existed,’ Kelly says. ‘He was real. And if that’s true, what other explanation is there?’

I shrug again, feigning a nonchalance I don’t really feel. Because the hope that Charlie swiftly extinguished on the beach after telling me when Andrew died has since revived. Kelly’s right – Andrew MacNeil existed. Before today – for me – he hadn’t. And perhaps that same man came to this island and died here twenty-five years ago as Robert Reid. A man who lived in the very same blackhouse that I am renting. The same house. It can’t be just coincidence. No matter what Charlie told me, all of that has to mean something. It has to. I think of how determined I’d been looking out at that flat sea; the childlike confidence in my Out there! I remember the feeling so well because I’ve rarely felt it since. Absolute conviction.