‘Only because she keeps leaving the latch off,’ Ezra insisted. ‘I don’t know why she wouldn’t check and double-check to make sure it’s properly closed anyway. If it is, it means I can’t get through without asking, and we both know she loves that.’

Ezra adored his cottage, he really did, but the quirk of ownership that involved external access to his garden was a legal wrinkle he could well do without. He was in the middle of the row of little houses below the lighthouse. Unlike Edie’s on the end, or that of his neighbours on the other side, or Cullen’s gatehouse beyond that, Ezra’s garden could not open directly onto the otherwise empty hill behind. One of the half-submerged boulders, left behind an aeon ago by the passing glacier that had created the valley in which Newton Dunbar stood, truncated the rear of his property so successfully that, if not for inquisitive children wanting to climb it, he wouldn’t require a rear fence at all.

What the estate could have done when they had been dividing up the property was to make sure the plot containing his house had at least enough space beside the boulder for a rear gate. What they had done instead was write into the deeds that the owner of his cottage would by law have rear access to its garden via the Corner Cottage.

This clause hadn’t given his solicitor any cause for alarm. He’d told Ezra that it was not an unknown feature of deeds in the area. Ezra hadn’t thought too much about it. He’d supposed – naively, as it turned out – that whoever lived next door would be a reasonable and friendly neighbour, as Ezra himself intended to be. He’d never had an issue getting on with people before, however unpleasant they had been. If he had, his career on the rigs would have been a short one.

He’d never quite been able to understand where his problems with Edie Strang had begun. If not for the fact that their relationship had got off to a perfectly amicable start, he might have labelled her a bigot. There were, after all, plenty in Newton Dunbar. But for the first few weeks – months, even – they had been friends. Back then he’d sometimes even thought there had been the potential for more. It had been Edie who had taken him into the bookshop for the first time, eager to introduce a fellow reader to the place and her friends. They’d had drinks at the pub, shared chats through the gate, argued good-naturedly about their respective reading tastes. She’d given him advice on the garden because he’d never had one before and deciding what to do with it had been overwhelming for a novice. She had seemed to him at the time a fascinating, spirited, talented – he loved her art – entirely reasonable and rather beautiful woman.

That was fifteen years ago now, and Ezra had given up trying to work out what had gone wrong. At some point their interactions had turned hostile, the blame for which Ezra laid squarely at Edie’s door because he’d thought and thought about it and was sure that there was nothing he’d done that would explain this sea change. It was what it was. Ezra had shrugged and got on with life, but refused to tiptoe around Edie Strang and her inexplicable bitterness towards him. He’d grown to love the bookshop and most of the friends that gathered within its thick stone walls. He wasn’t intending to move on from this place. Edie Strang would just have to give him room.