‘They’re your friends too now,’ Rachel told him, laughing. ‘You can’t blame them all on me!’

‘I suppose they are,’ he said, surprised at the realization. ‘That happened without me even being aware of it.’

‘Hmm,’ Rachel took a mouthful of beer and nodded before adding, ‘I know the feeling. I never intended to stay in Newton Dunbar. I was only ever here by accident in the first place, but here I am, five years later, and now I can’t imagine living anywhere else.’

‘How did you end up here, if it wasn’t intentional?’ Toby asked, curious.

Rachel glanced at him, and for a moment he felt as if he were being assessed for trustworthiness. Those eyes of hers had a way of slicing right through him. He imagined they could be very cold in anger.

‘My van broke down,’ she said.

‘I see,’ Toby said, although he didn’t see at all.

Rachel looked at him, still assessing. Then she seemed to decide something. ‘I lived in it. It was home. Had been for years, I didn’t have anywhere else.’

She paused, as if to gauge his reaction. Toby would have been lying if he’d said he wasn’t surprised by this revelation, but he’d had years of listening to extraordinary and often terrible stories without giving away his feelings.

‘What sort of van was it?’ he asked instead, because questions had always been his saviour.

‘A VW. A very old one.’

‘Classic.’

Rachel laughed. ‘That’s one word for it. Small, cramped and freezing cold in winter would be others.’

‘Yours, though.’

‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘All mine. And mobile.’

He wanted to ask why this was so important, but experience told him now was not the time.

‘Anyway,’ Rachel said after a moment, ‘I was on my way to see if I could get some work for the season picking raspberries at one of the big farms. I stopped to see the bookshop because I’d seen Edie’s postcards somewhere else and it said where the tower was on the back. The van clapped out at the bottom of the hill. I asked Cullen if I could use the phone to call a mechanic. He made me tea while we waited, which took hours, and we talked. When the mechanic finally came and told me how much it’d be to fix, I knew I was never going to drive her anywhere again. I was trying to figure out what I was going to do because I already had no money and now I had no transport, as well as no home and no work, when Cullen offered me a job, and that was that. Goodbye camper van, hello lighthouse.’

Toby smiled. ‘As if it was meant to be.’

Rachel laughed, and he liked it, that sound. ‘I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. Cullen – it never even occurred to him to be suspicious of someone with no fixed abode, no references, no history of working in a bookshop. He came right out and offered me a place and a way to live, just like that.’