“Were you and Charlie close?” Lucy asked, reading between the lines that Charlie MacIntyre might well have been a bit intimidated by his big brother. “I know you were the elder,” she said. “Was it just the two of you?”

“No, I’ve another brother and sister as well,” Finn said, relaxing onto his back again. The gathering shadows sculpted the line of his jaw and the stubble there, and Lucy could see the silhouette of his eyelashes against his cheek. It made her feel slightly breathless.

“The others are all younger than me,” Finn was saying, “and I guess I can be protective of them all. Charlie was the youngest and he was only twenty-two, just out of college, when he came here.” He cleared his throat. “We all grew up on an island. There weren’t that many other kids around so it was lucky we got on with each other, but the flip side of that is that we are all pretty tight, so when something bad happens...” Again he let the sentence hang.

“It’s a shame you all had to pay such a heavy price for that happy childhood,” Lucy said. “Which island did you grow up on?”

“It’s called Coll,” Finn said. “One of the Hebrides.” He slanted her a look. “Have you ever been to Scotland?”

“Only once,” Lucy said. “I didn’t have too many holidays. I was usually too busy practicing and studying the violin. But I do remember one Duke of Edinburgh Awards trip to the Cairngorms. It rained and there were midges and we all moaned like teenage girls do when they are being particularly annoying.”

Finn laughed. “Maybe you just didn’t see the country at its best.” His voice softened, his Scots accent suddenly more pronounced. Lucy found it ridiculously seductive. “It’s a beautiful place, Scotland,” Finn said. “And Coll is the most beautiful part of it, with white sand beaches like the tropics and clear night skies full of stars and the wind blowing the scent of the sea and the heather to you. We all ran wild as children and it was grand.”

Lucy felt a pang of envy for that sort of carefree childhood. Hers had been almost submerged under the weight of expectation and the need not to let her parents and Cleo down when they had sacrificed so much for her music.

“It sounds idyllic,” she said. “Have you ever wanted to go back there to live?”

“One day, maybe,” Finn said. “My parents still live on Coll. I went back after...” He paused. “Well, Charlie is buried there.”

This time he was the one who took her hand, interlocking his fingers with hers, warm and strong. It felt very natural. Lucy stared at the sky, imagining the endlessness of that last journey home, the long, lonely hours accompanying his brother’s coffin.

Geoffrey stirred with a little sleepy bark and they jumped apart as though caught in the middle of a guilty act before bursting out laughing.