‘Well,’ Cathy said. ‘Look at it this way. At least now you’ve told him.’

Outside, the north wind was doing its best to blow the Fishergirl’s Luck into the sea. Inside, Anna lay curled in her bed with the phone to her ear as the rain lashed so hard against the window she could barely hear her friend speak.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘There is that.’

She’d stood in Liam’s small room in the house near the harbour where he was lodging, the storm outside gathering more strength by the minute, and talked as simply as she could about something that was not simple at all. Liam had listened, head bowed in concentration, not looking at her.

‘I know this isn’t ideal, but I’m going to keep it,’ she’d told him.

He’d looked at her then, his usual twinkle dimmed by a frown that creased his forehead. ‘But I’ve got to go back to New Zealand. I’m going home really soon.’

‘I know.’

He’d shaken his head, as if in denial that these two factors could ever be compatible.

‘Maybe I shouldn’t have told you,’ Anna had ventured. ‘Maybe it would have been better for you never to know.’

The look he’d given her had been a dark one. ‘Maybe.’

‘I’m going to go now,’ she’d told him then. ‘If you want to talk to me again, you know where I am.’

She was at the bottom of the stairs when he appeared at the top of them. ‘You can’t walk in this,’ he said. ‘I’ll drive you.’

‘It’s fine, I’ll—’

He was already on his way down. ‘I’ll drive you.’

Back at home in the Fishergirl’s Luck, she’d stared at that photograph of her and her parents from so many years ago and tried not to think about the cupboard full of more pickled beetroot than any one family could reasonably eat. What would it be, to be loved like that? She saw Young Robbie’s solemn face in her mind. She’d picked up her phone and sent Cathy a text that read Are you awake?

Now here she was, numb and empty apart from that tiny part of herself that would one day, sooner than she could currently comprehend, be another person.

‘What are you going to do now?’ Cathy asked.

‘I told him it’s up to him if he wants to talk to me again. In the meantime…’

‘In the meantime?’

Anna rolled over and stared at her ceiling, wondering how many tiles the Fishergirl’s Luck would have lost by morning. ‘I’ll work.’