“Aye, it was. And I was a different man, in many ways. I hadnae learned to cope with missing my wife.” I look over again, surprised at his honesty. He’s very determinedly not looking at me at all. This walk was never about finding the path. “I’m partly to blame. Just like the way you are, the way your life has turned out, is partly because we never found your dad. That was my job and . . . I didnae do it. And I’m sorry for that.”

“Well.” I’m caught off-balance. Once again, I’ve failed to appreciate that my parents’ story touched more lives than mine. “Well, I . . . I believe you did everything you could.”

“I did.”

“And my life isn’t that bad,” I say drolly. “When I’m not being terrorized out of my own home, that is.”

He expels air sharply in what might be a laugh. We’ve reached the loch already, and we search the edge for a few minutes, looking for any sign of a path that might match the photo. But there’s nothing to be seen there now.

Later, back at the farmhouse, Callum comes home red cheeked and muddy. I ask him what the score was, and he tells me they lost 5–3, but he was the one who scored all three. And Stuart Davidson was an absolute gobshite to him afterward.

My father is . . . I don’t know, I can’t think, I won’t think about it. He’s dead, or alive; he’s a thief, or a victim; he’s . . . I won’t think about it, I won’t think about any of it, because whatever else he might be, my father is not here.

TWENTY-ONE

It’s done.

The DNA of Jonathan and me, those intertwining strands and bonds that made we two into an us, has been torn asunder. Actually, not torn, exactly, since I more or less took a knife to the sections which were still holding together. A clean break, a neat slice, if there ever could be such a thing in matters of the heart.

I miss you, he said.

You could always get on a plane.

Carrie calls me just as I’m waving off the man who has fitted the Manse with an alarm. I texted her that Jonathan and I had a fight, though fight is not the right word—it suggests fire and fury, whereas this was a study in measured statements, at least until the last few exchanges. I’m not sure whether I texted her because I wanted her to call me or because she would have wanted me to reach out, but it amounts to the same in the end. “Are you okay? What happened?”

You know I can’t do that, he said.

I know you won’t do that.