‘Hi, um, my name is Maggie Anderson. I was wondering if you could give me a contact number for Gordon Cameron, please? It’s a personal matter. He’d know me as Maggie MacKay, daughter of Viv. I’m available on this number. Thanks.’

‘I was in a car accident,’ I say now, apropos of nothing but that Don’t. I look at Will as I touch my right eyelid. ‘Anisocoria – a permanently dilated pupil caused by severe head injury. I bull’s-eyed a car windscreen when I was four years old.’ A face, its mouth a perfect round O. ‘Mum always told me that I just let go of her hand, ran into the road. She told me that so many times. But.’ I pick up my wine again. ‘When I was about fourteen, she got really pissed, and stayed pissed. For days. She did that, sometimes. And she told me that it had been her fault. She’d let go of my hand, she’d run into the road. She would have these intrusive thoughts, impulses, and sometimes she’d act on them. And I … I’d been trying to stop her.’

Will puts his hand on my arm. I can feel its heat through two layers of wool before I pull away.

‘She thought she was psychic. She knew everything about life and death. She saw visions. She received messages. Insights.’ My fingers are tapping a nervous and angry tattoo against the table and I curl them into fists. ‘She was obsessed with those godawful TV shows; fake mediums wandering around graveyards with earnest faces. Fleecing grieving relatives while they pretended to solve their loved ones’ murders. Mum would’ve loved to be that. To do that. To be believed like that.’

I look at Will; finally say out loud what I’ve been thinking ever since seeing the date on that death certificate and that photo in the Stornoway Gazette. Mum’s bright eyes, that smile she was trying and failing to hide.

‘What if Mum lied to me? What if none of it was ever true? What if she made me believe it?’

‘You think she made up the whole reincarnation thing?’ Will says.

I’m using him as a sounding board, maybe even a confessional. And it’s inappropriate, but at the same time, it feels completely normal. Completely natural. And I know I’m not going to stop. ‘No. I don’t know. I was five. I mean, I don’t remember all of it, but I do remember believing it. Being sure of it absolutely.’

But I know, too, that for Mum, lying had been like breathing. Made all the more dangerous because she nearly always believed her own lies. And as a child at least, I’d always been ready – far too ready – to run into the road to save her. But what happened here twenty years ago has always felt to me too sacrosanct, too indelible, too big a part of us. It defined us, it was our history – a story told again and again like a mantra, a vow, the biggest tie to ever bind us together. My chest tightens again. The only time when we were the same. A flashback to so many fights, so many tears. All the times I shouted, wounded and ashamed, and always so, so alone. I hate you! I’m nothing like you!