That day was miserable. Cormac had given him a tonic that I’d made to ease the pain, but he wouldn’t fuck with the leg. The bone was sticking through the flesh and John was being stoic about it, but I wasn’t. One look at it gave me the boke, and Owen had to put his head between his legs. Only Kit was really able to handle the blood.

John’s house is the only one that sits on the trail this far down, so it has to be where Isla is leading me. Of course Kit would live in the loneliest house on the island. From down at the beach, you can’t even see Cormac’s house, or the lights from the village. All you can see at night are the stacks and the sea cave and the distant blinking of the lighthouse on the far side of the island.

“The tide is in,” Isla says, stopping suddenly. I skid a bit when I stop as well, and the dewy grass squeaks under my trainers.

“So?”

“So, the tide is in,” she says, pointing to a patch of beach that’s under water. “It’s too early for high tide, isn’t it?”

“I dunno. It’s Mab. Things never work like they’re meant to here.”

“The tide always works the same way,” Isla grumbles, but begins to walk again.

“Did John move out?” I ask, surveying the sea and changing the topic. I’d forgotten that this walk feels like it takes years, and you just keep going until you see something other than grass and sea. Glasgow has spoiled me. I’m winded just going downhill.

“I don’t know who John is,” Isla responds. “But Kit rents the house at the bottom of the hill. I think the owner moved to Birth.”

“You mean Perth?”

Isla shrugs.

“Whatever.”

When we reach the base of the track where the old, half-flooded fishing road picks up, the house comes into view. Small, made of grey stone and white roughcast walls, with a wee garden allotment ringed by a low stone and searock wall. There’s no back garden; it just leads down to the low sea wall that keeps the tide back.

If there were any question about whether Kit is living here, it’s answered when I see Cormac’s rusting blue jeep sitting in the dirt drive.

Aside from the traumatic ten minutes I spent staring at John Andrew’s busted leg, I’ve only really been in this house once, when I was twelve, the day that Owen came to live with us. Cormac had sent Kit and me out to play, but it was raining too heavily for us to make our usual wanders and the tide was in so we couldn’t cross the causeway to Eòghan's Cave. John had taken pity on us and let us sit in his kitchen and watch as he fixed lines and sharpened blades and retooled his fishing nets.