‘You okay?’

No. My mum just died. ‘Yes. Sorry.’ I look away, back towards the lounge. ‘So … the great and the good?’

‘Right.’ She looks over at a couple sitting alone at a nearby table. ‘The old guy is Charlie MacLeod.’ His grey hair is wild, his stubble patched silver, his skin the colour and texture of someone who has spent a lifetime outdoors. ‘He’s like a hundred and fifty years old. Has an opinion about everything and everyone.’

The woman next to him is small and smiling. Her silver hair sits over her shoulder in a long heavy plait; her hands are big-knuckled with arthritis.

‘That’s Isla Campbell. Lives outside the village at Sheltered Bay. She’s a cool dude, tough as old boots. Basically, I want to be her when I grow up.’ Kelly nudges me. ‘Her son, David, lives in Glasgow. Single and hot as fuck. I chickened out last year, but I’m going to make my move when he comes back over for the peat harvesting.’

She points to a younger man playing pool on the table behind, sandy-blond and stocky. ‘And that’s Donnie MacKenzie. Gillian and Bruce’s son.’ She snorts. ‘Donnie’s Gillian with a Y chromosome. Don’t think there’s any actual MacKenzie in him at all.’ She ducks her head as Bruce turns towards our end of the bar. ‘Long-running island joke. Not everyone finds it funny, obviously. When they first took the pub over from my parents—’

‘Your parents used to own this place?’

‘Leased it. I mean, everyone in the village has always helped out here or at the shop – I work at least a couple of shifts a week behind the bar – but there’s always been someone in charge, you know, on the paperwork. And it used to be my parents. Dad had this crazy idea of becoming a farmer once, but thankfully that didn’t last long.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘Can you imagine? I’d have had to buy wellies.’

She glances along the bar. ‘Donnie was just a kid when his parents took over running this place. They own the next-door farm and croft. You’ll have seen it when you arrived: two cottages, huge stone barn, outbuildings, acres of land. Another long-running joke is that the MacKenzies own the “right” half of the village. Donnie manages the farm full-time now.’ She shrugs. ‘He’s all right. In the under-thirty club, at least. Divorced. Two part-time kids. You know, if you’re in the market for being a farmer’s wife.’

She talks so quickly, it’s hard to keep up, but I don’t mind. Even if that weight in my stomach is unchanged, the anxiety that’s been sitting inside my chest since London has begun to unspool.

‘If there’s going to be some kind of test after this, I’m not going to remember names, never mind anything else.’

Kelly arches a brow. ‘Listen, after a couple of days you’ll know how many bowel movements they all do in an average week.’

My laugh is loud enough to attract the attention of one of the fishermen on the other side of the bar. Tall and broad-shouldered, with jet-black hair and a Roman nose, he shoots me a strange long look through narrowed eyes.