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
No wonder most of the buildings here were holiday homes, Anna thought. Who in their right mind would live here permanently by choice? Even now, in the brightest sunshine of spring and when the sea was calm, it was a forbidding prospect: fascinating, yes, but a place to visit, surely not to stay. She knew, also from her reading, that it had been established in the wake of the Clearances. The first people to live here full time had done so because they’d had nowhere else to go and this was one of the few places the English had no use for. As a result Crovie had seemed to her from a distance to be a symbol of something beyond how cruel the powerful can be. Of what, she wasn’t entirely sure. Ingenuity? Tenacity? Hope? Or was it because she had nowhere to go either?
Idiot, she thought again. Idiot.
Then, before her, there it was. The Fishergirl’s Luck. It was the name that had caught her attention as much as the setting. It was painted on a letterbox to the left of the door, below the single square window. The door itself was painted a cornflower blue that matched the sky above the small building’s roof, a cheery colour despite the fact that it was beginning to peel slightly in the strong salt wind.
Anna stared at her new front door. The For Sale posting had featured photographs of the interior, but right now all she could remember of them was a tiny wooden staircase leading to an attic room scarcely big enough for a single bed, and a sense of compact cosiness that could easily be put down to estate agent trickery with a camera. Looking at the dimensions of the place, it couldn’t be more than one room downstairs. It really was a shed – it must have been converted from something originally built as storage.
Anna tried not to panic. It had water and electricity. It had a shower, for goodness’ sake, it wasn’t a hovel. Just because from the outside it looked like a shack didn’t mean it would be one inside. The peeling paint of the door meant nothing. She’d grown too accustomed to living in show homes, that was all: apartments with space and taste but no character.