‘I am “sticking around” as you call it. You’re the one heading back.’ Seeing Chrissy’s reaction to that announcement, Rhona realized that Chrissy had assumed she would be returning with her, whereas she had no intention of going back to Glasgow yet.

‘I want to go home and sleep in my own bed at the cottage,’ Rhona had said, trying to lighten the mood.

For once Chrissy had nothing to say in response. In fact Rhona could almost see her bite her tongue in an effort to remain silent.

So here she was, driving the dark road through the rain alone, and glad of it.

Rhona turned the windscreen wipers up a notch as the radio informed her that the west of Scotland in particular was experiencing very heavy rain and flooding in a number of locations.

‘Tell me about it,’ she said in return as she drove through another sheet of water.

It seemed the worst affected at the moment wasn’t Skye, but the Rest & Be Thankful pass in Argyll, which was closed to traffic as two very large boulders were threatening the road, despite the fact that the extra-strong fences erected along the pass were containing the debris from the current run-off.

At least the road to Sleat was relatively flat, Rhona thought, and she wasn’t being sent on a sixty-mile detour in order to get home, unlike the poor residents of Argyll.

Her thoughts returned to the track up through the plantation and the small encampment hidden among the Sitka spruce. It wouldn’t be pleasant up there in heavy rain, and probably worse than during the recent snowstorms.

The girl’s words, ‘we can take anything Skye throws at us’, had suggested she would be unfazed by the new conditions, yet what people said and what they actually thought could be entirely different.

As I know too well.

Rhona ran over the strange meeting in the woods once again, looking for some reason other than her own state of mind for her disquiet about it. She was used to trusting her own judgement, often against the odds, but the sin-eater case had seemingly changed things and she found herself constantly questioning her ability to read people and situations.

Something had told her that the girl was frightened. Was it because she too was living on the edge of fear and not admitting to it? Was she merely transferring her own emotions onto the girl?

Rhona shook her head in an effort to dispel such thoughts. What was the point of avoiding psychotherapy if she was analysing herself all the time?

The latest episode in the plantation, she acknowledged, had unnerved her. Similar events had plagued her since her captivity, but they had been diminishing in frequency and power. Something she’d put down to her stay here on the island.