Charlie shakes his head. ‘There’s no such thing as ghosts.’

‘Everyone has ghosts, Charlie.’ Because he isn’t as unaffected as he’d like me to think. There’s a reluctance in his eyes, a shadow he doesn’t want to acknowledge. When he says nothing more, I get up, stand in front of the warmth of the burner, even though I’m cold down to my bones.

‘This is a thin place,’ I say. ‘These islands, and especially this coast. Where the Nine Worlds meet. Where innangarðs meets utangarðs – inside the fence meets outside the fence. Order meets chaos.’ I close my eyes. ‘I know you can feel it, Charlie. This land, this place, is like nowhere else in the world.’

‘That why you left?’

‘I escaped. Because I didn’t understand that they’d come with me. That this place would come with me. I got married, had a son, changed my name by deed poll, and none of it made any difference. I still heard them; still saw them. I could never …’ I shake my head. ‘I hated it in Aberdeen. I hated the rocks and bitter east wind. I’d swapped light and colour for … grey. The Atlantic for the North Sea. And none of it mattered anyway. I’d sacrificed my life here for worse there.’

I turn round, and Charlie is still sitting at the table, his expression unreadable. I can hear the wind howling inside the sea-carved spaces under our feet.

‘I can’t live anywhere else. I don’t.’ I blow out a breath. ‘But I need to tell someone what I did, Charlie. The terrible thing I did.’ Because he’ll never ask me, I realise. I can see it in that shadow in his eyes. That fear he pretends he doesn’t feel.

‘You don’t, Robert.’

‘I do.’ My voice cracks, and I let it. ‘I need to tell someone.’

Charlie’s sigh is long and unsteady.

‘All right,’ he says. But he doesn’t look at me when he says it. ‘Then tell me.’

CHAPTER 12

My sleep is disjointed and light. I wake often, the darkness an unwelcome escape from acid, jarring dreams of black-tar valleys and angry seas and skeletal birds. A crumbling cliff of rock and grass; the wind trying to snatch me; the sea wild and dark and roaring. My last dream is less reprieve than revision. Mum, raw and loud. Wasted to nothing in her hospital bed. Her face a skull, teeth too wide and too white inside her smile.

And it feels like choking, like drowning in a storm. Her fingers thin and skin bruised, and that terrible smile. You just have to make the right choice, Maggie, that’s all. And you always do. Because she knows I will. Even when I don’t think it’s the right choice at all.

I wake up, still choking, mouth open, throat dry. For a moment, I forget where I am, feel like I’m still in that antiseptic hot room, waiting, worrying, trying to sleep on a fold-down bed.