‘Wait.’ I still myself, wineglass inches from my lips. ‘You’re saying that Kenny Campbell died just after Robert and Lorne?’

Will nods. ‘A few weeks after, I think. Not sure when exactly.’

‘That’s weird.’ It’s more than weird. Even if I account for Will’s There’s plenty danger here. Plenty that’ll kill you. But it isn’t people.

Will shrugs. ‘Isla just got on with it, Euan said. Poured all her love into David instead. Grief changes folk, I guess. Sometimes for the better; most times not. Look at Alec. I don’t think he’s ever tried to get over Lorne’s death.’ He grimaces. ‘’Course, what the hell would I know about losing someone? Charlie’s wife only left him, and it was like he became a different person overnight.’

‘Charlie’s wife left him?’

‘Aye, maybe fifteen years ago? But I think it had been on the cards a long time. Rumour is Charlie had an affair with someone on the island back in the nineties.’

‘Charlie?’

Will laughs, but there’s little humour in it. ‘I know. Maybe it isn’t even true, just island gossip. But when Moira left, Charlie just kind of … stopped.’ He sighs. ‘It’s like the fun, easy-going guy who’d spent hours chasing us up and down Long Stride when we were kids, or teaching us how to swim in Loch Dubh, never existed.’

We stop talking as the waitress arrives to take away our plates.

‘Come on, Maggie,’ he says when she’s gone. ‘This is completely fucking depressing. Tell me something about you. You’re always the one asking me questions.’

‘I think we’ve talked enough about me tonight,’ I say, my face getting hot.

He looks at me a little too long. As if he already knows all the things about me that I’d rather die than tell him. When the silence between us stretches longer, I resist the urge to fold my arms.

‘I’m just not that interesting, Will.’

‘I think you are, Maggie MacKay.’

‘Anderson.’ I can feel my face getting warm. ‘I was born in Croy, but we moved to England in—’

‘You’re Scottish?’ When I nod, he laughs, shakes his head. ‘You’re Scottish and I’m English. Guess you saw right through the whole It’s a Scots tradition to dance the first dance with a local, then?’

I smile. ‘Mum married my stepfather, James, when I was ten, and we moved to Essex, then Hither Green. After high school, I did English lit at UCL, and got a job as a features intern and then writer at a women’s magazine you’ll never have heard of.’

‘You still live in Hither Green?’

‘No. I have – had – a flat in Blackheath. Ridiculously overpriced.’ And mostly paid for by Ravi, who’d insisted that if he had to live south of the river, it was there or nowhere.

‘That where you lived with the person who gave you that ring?’ He touches the faded white band of skin on my finger lightly with his thumb, and I instinctively draw my hands into fists again.