After a moment Anna dropped her hand and squared her shoulders, regarding the village. The single row of houses had been built on a narrow curve of sloping ground beneath a rolling bank of green cliffs. Between them and the shore there was no road, just a concrete path that edged the sea wall. On occasion, she had read, a stray wave had dragged the unwary out to sea and in high tide or during storms this route was often impassable. The idea of this had seemed both extraordinary and romantic as she’d read about it, but now, faced with the reality, Anna realized that though the former was true, the latter most definitely wasn’t. Most of the houses had been built with their gables pointing towards the sea. Here, survival against the elements was more important than a view.

This little line of homes made up the village of Crovie. Anna had bought the smallest one of all. She could see it from where she stood. It looked – it was – little more than a stone shed, standing directly on the sea wall halfway down the village, its back to the North Sea and its face to the other houses and the cliff. The path that had now revealed itself to be terrifying rather than romantic was Anna’s only route to the home she had bought, sight unseen, because it was better than staying another month, another week, another day in Geoff’s pristine Kensington penthouse.

‘Idiot,’ she muttered to herself. ‘Anna, you complete and utter idiot.’

Still, there was nothing for it now but to go and collect the keys. Anna locked her car door and took a deep breath before striking out towards her new home.

The last building in the village, the one nearest the road, wasn’t a house at all, she realized. The gable end was whitewashed and faded into the grubby paint were large grey letters proclaiming it as the Crovie Inn. There were old menus still taped up in the windows, but it had obviously been shut for some time. Anna wondered where the nearest pub was now and thought it was probably at Gardenstown, another coastal village that was situated across the large natural bay in the Moray Firth on which Crovie had also been built. Anna turned to see it emerging now, across the gently chopping water and beyond the monolith of rock that truncated the far end of the rocky beach. Gardenstown spilled down a wide cleft in the cliffs, zig-zagging in steps until it reached the bay and harbour below, both of which, though not large, dwarfed Crovie’s by comparison. In fact, Crovie’s harbour was really no more than a little pier with moorings for a few boats, though the single one there now was a battered-looking wooden dinghy sitting precariously atop a forest of rocks as it waited for the tide to turn.