Anna spent the next week painting. She started with the downstairs living space, borrowing dustsheets from Frank and carefully rolling up her new rug. It was amazing what a difference the clean walls made. Anna had chosen a bright white paint that made the most of the light that filtered in through the bothy’s few windows and helped the interior of the Fishergirl’s Luck to feel bigger. It was a tiring job, though, and when the sun began to shine just as she was almost finished with the final coat, Anna took it as a sign that she should listen to Cathy and have an actual holiday, one where she wasn’t constantly looking for something to do.

By the Thursday of her week-long ‘holiday’, however, Anna was restless. She had thought, after years of long hours and few holidays, her body would thank her for a prolonged period of complete relaxation. Once she’d decided that her sojourn in Crovie was a vacation, Anna had imagined she could catch up on all the books she’d always planned to read and had never had the time to pick up, seek out the best places on the coastline around her to swim, go for day-long sun-drenched hikes where the only time she had to worry about was when it would be too dark to find her way home. She had expected long lie-ins and lazy afternoons spent in cafés. Instead, she woke as early as ever, and without anything else to occupy her, she kept thinking about things best left behind – about her father and how she hadn’t seen him nearly enough in his last years, about how much she missed him. She also kept thinking about Geoff, to whom her dad had never warmed. Why had she put up with Geoff for so long? How had he managed to convince her that a half-life with him was as good as she could ever hope to get? She found she was becoming angry with herself at the time she had wasted, the years that could have been so much better spent.

Anna’s need for distraction and the enjoyment she had felt as she prepared for Pat and Frank’s gathering gave her a renewed desire to cook. She supposed she should be pleased that the passion for the skill she had thought jaded beyond recovery had in fact only been on hiatus, and that her new circumstances had allowed it to flourish again. The problem was, of course, that now she had only herself to cook for.