Anna listened to this exchange with a smile on her face, though a curious pang had worked its way into her heart. It felt familiar, though it wasn’t the sort of relationship she and Geoff had ever had. Anna found herself going back to her early years, when her mother had still been alive and her father had been young. They had been happy, her parents, right up until the blip on the hospital screen that had reduced first her mother’s life expectancy and then, eventually, her father’s optimistic nature. Anna stared at her fingers as they gripped her mug. She was older now than her mother had been when the cancer had taken hold, and what did she have to show for it? A career that had been permanently truncated in favour of a man who had never loved anything but himself, and the deeds to a house no larger than a shoebox, in a place she had no roots.

She became aware of silence and glanced up to see Pat and Frank looking at each other, as if they’d been speaking to her and received no response.

‘Sorry,’ she said, rubbing a hand over her face. ‘I zoned out there for a moment. It’s been a long few days.’

‘I bet it has,’ Pat said sympathetically.

‘You know,’ Anna went on, looking up at Frank. ‘Maybe I will take you up on your lock-picking offer. If you really don’t think it’ll offend Mr MacKenzie?’

‘It won’t,’ Frank said confidently. ‘We’ll call Barbara and let her know you’ve managed to get in so he doesn’t have to come over when he lands. He’ll be relieved, I bet.’

Three

Shortly afterwards, Anna stood by as Crovie’s answer to the Pink Panther fiddled with the lock on her new front door. There was no sign of any other human movement in the village at all. The wind was getting up as the light began to tip towards dusk, dashing foamy waves against the sea wall so that they split against the stone with a noise somewhere between a hiss and a sigh. Overhead the gulls cried and cried, circling on air currents as turbulent and as unseen as a riptide. Anna’s gaze followed the staggered line of houses until they curved out of sight, melding with the rock. The grassy cliffs were changing colour in the early evening sun, turning to gold as the light trembled against them, making shadows out of all their ragged edges. Crovie seemed to her as if it were caught between two tides, and the cliffs were not cliffs at all but another wall of water, about to crash down to meet the sea at the exact point where she now stood.

‘Gotcha!’ Frank exclaimed, and the door of the Fishergirl’s Luck popped open with a slight metallic twang. He looked up at her with a beam on his face.