Chapters (39)
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Prologue
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Epilogue
- Author’s note
- Acknowledgements
- About the Author
They won’t cast off, she thought to herself, staring wildly into the darkness. Not with three men left out there. Not with Robert and Liam and Douglas still—
She became aware of a closer commotion happening behind her. Anna turned to see Frank on his knees, Pat holding his shoulders. Two of the lifeboat crew were with the couple, doing something that Anna couldn’t make out. Had Frank fallen? The scene took on the strange effect of a stage tableau, the harsh white lights making everything unreal and staccato as they strobed into the storm. Anna couldn’t understand what was going on. She could see only slices of action, movements frozen into frames. Everything was happening in stutters, disconnected, underscored by sounds too huge to mean anything at all.
Anna moved towards her friends. Time slowed. If felt as if she were fighting her way through mud. Then a louder roar took up behind her. It sounded like an ancient creature, bellowing into the falling sky. The rain took on a new smell, incongruous in the storm. Wet earth.
The cliff was coming down.
Anna turned, gripping the lifeboat’s handrail with one hand, the other against the baby hidden away inside her. She could see nothing beyond the harbour but knew, clear as day, that there were tons of earth and rock raining down from the cliffs. On Douglas McKean’s house. On the entire village. On Liam Harper. On Robert MacKenzie.
‘Please,’ she felt herself screaming impotently into the wind. ‘Please—’
Then there they were. Three figures stumbled out of the collapsing darkness. Two trying to run through a streaming torrent, either side of a smaller figure they were holding up between them.
Thirty
Frank hadn’t fallen. It was a heart attack. Pat looked on in agony as the lifeboat crew did what they could, but they couldn’t save the man who had been by her side for thirty-five years. Frank died on the way to Macduff, but it was Pat who looked like a ghost. She sat in the lifeboat station wrapped in a blanket, gripped by a grief that speared all who saw it.
‘He’d been having trouble for while,’ Pat sobbed, as Anna held her hand and let the tears slide down her own face. ‘I tried to get him to slow down. But he wouldn’t listen. Not to me, not to the doctors. Not to his own heart! Still kept on as he always had. “Can’t teach an old dog new tricks, love,” that’s what he’d say. Oh, Frank—’