Ben fills the silence. “I don’t know whether they’re your father’s bones, but I think—we think that someone has taken them and is using them to terrorize you. We’re going to go to the police tomorrow and explain. But we wanted to tell you first.” He looks like a man who has finally got something off his chest. “I’m so sorry that we didn’t do it before.”

I take a sip of my wine. I still don’t know what to say. Suddenly Fiona speaks, as if she’s finally woken up. “It’s your father,” she says quietly. “It’s always been your father.”

“What?” Ben is staring at her, grabbing her shoulder. “Are you sure?” he asks shakily. “You’ve never said so before.”

“I’m saying it now,” she says to him, with an odd dignity. “It’s her father. She ought to know.”

“How do you know?” The words are mine, but I don’t recognize the voice.

Fiona turns to me. “You know how I know.”

“Fiona,” says Jamie warningly.

“She’s going to find out sooner or later. Sooner, I think. Maybe tomorrow.” She turns her hazel eyes on me, bluntly sympathetic. “He died, Ailsa, all those years ago. I’m so sorry.”

I leave.

•   •   •

Ben catches me when I’m maybe a third of the way home, stomping along the roadside. He slows his BMW to a walking pace with the window wound down. “Ailsa,” he calls. “Please, get in. I’ll give you a lift home.”

“I’m happy walking.” Happy. That’s a joke, the universe’s bad joke, and I’m the butt of it.

“We don’t have to talk if you don’t want to.”

“Believe me, I really don’t want to.”

“It’s raining.”

“I daresay I’ll survive.” I walk on, pulling my coat tightly closed around my neck. What was originally a few meager drops of rain is rapidly becoming a very heavy shower. It’s still light—it’s not even seven o’clock—but the rain clouds are making it feel like dusk. Ben’s headlights are on, painting the raindrops they can reach with a silver light.

“Come on, Ailsa, jump in. You’re getting soaked.”

He brings the car to a stop the moment I turn to face him. “Do you have any idea how completely fucked-up the lot of you are? Who on earth plays with a skeleton? At seven years old?” I have a vision of the three of them as children—Ben, Fiona and Jamie—sitting cross-legged in a circle around a toy tea set in a cave, with a grinning skeleton sitting upright as the fourth member of the gang.

“Believe me, I get it,” he says earnestly. “I only saw it the once, and that was enough.” Then he adds, wretchedly, “But I promised.”