‘I’m so glad you’re here.’ She lets me go just long enough to flash another big grin before hugging me again. ‘I was beginning to think I’d imagined you. How was your journey? Awful, I’ll bet. It’s probably easier to get to the North Pole. Gillian, can I have my usual?’

Kelly climbs onto a stool next to me and turns to face the lounge. ‘Ah, I missed the monthly mass moan,’ she says. ‘What a shame. Complaining is a full-time job to some folk around here.’ She hands over a fiver as Gillian sets another large glass of wine down on the bar. ‘Thanks.’ She looks at me and winks. ‘So. Would you like a quick rundown of the great and the good since you’re going to be living amongst them for the foreseeable?’

‘Sure.’

‘Okay.’ Kelly leans her elbows back against the bar, crosses her legs, and then points to four men squeezed around a small table. ‘Wank, Wank, Good Guy, Wank.’

When I start to laugh, she squeezes my arm. ‘Oh, thank God. Someone who finally gets my jokes. Please tell me you’re under thirty. That’s probably really rude. I mean, you look under thirty, obviously. It’s just that people around here have a habit of buggering off as soon as they leave school, and they don’t come back until they’re about ready to draw their pensions. Personally, I’m all for an invasion of archaeology students.’

I laugh again. She’s pretty much exactly how I imagined her. ‘I’m almost twenty-five,’ I say. ‘You didn’t leave?’

‘Mum and Dad moved to North Uist when I was like three, so I never really lived here at all until now. Most folk here tonight are from Urbost for the meeting, and in the summer, there’s always tourists. But the population of Blairmore is, like, seventeen. A grand total of seven are under thirty – and three of those are under ten. Including my five-year-old son.’

‘You have a son?’

‘Fraser.’ Her smile returns. ‘He’s partly why I came here. I left the islands when I was eighteen, met his dad in Glasgow. We had a pretty ugly break-up just over three years ago.’ The shadow that crosses her face is so brief I almost miss it. ‘A very long, very depressing story that would require more than one glass of vino to tell. But I’m going to go back. To Glasgow, I mean. Just as soon as I’ve got enough money to rent a flat, restart my training. I want to be a paediatric nurse. Oh my God, that’s such a fab necklace. Where did you get it?’

I look down, realise that I’ve pulled the long silver chain out of my jumper to rub the cool quartz of its pendant between finger and thumb. A nervous tic that I’ve never managed to shake. I think of Mum’s big open smile, the light in her eyes that always scared me. And how much I missed both the minute they were gone; the day she found me in the garden to tell me it was time to take her to the hospital. She’d have told me not to come here. That light in her eyes would have told me too. I know you can see the darkness. I know you can.