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Everyone on the island called her Sìneadh, though it was not the name she was born with. In the Gaelic, sìneadh means to lengthen, and the boys called her that because she was tall before them. Also, it was said, because her mind was up there in the clouds. The name stuck, by way of familiarity more than teasing.

That she was still there to be called Sìneadh surprised everyone. She had been sixteen when her mother chose to follow her father to the grave. It was commonly thought that with family ties gone, Sìneadh would soon be away to the mainland. Most young ones were. But two years on, she still lived in the croft where she’d grown up. She came close to explaining herself to Donald, the fisherman. Returning from a trip on his trawler one day, she jumped ashore and turned to throw the docking rope back. ‘Donald,’ she said, ‘when I touch this island, it’s like home rising through the soles of my feet. The soles of my feet and then up.’

Donald carried this story to the pub. ‘She’s a strange spirit altogether,’ he told his friend Angus. ‘A daydreamer, not the born fisherman her father was. She spent the day arse-up over the bow of my boat, waving at the fish to hurry away.’

‘You wouldn’t be catching much then,’ said Angus.

‘Not much,’ said Donald. ‘But it was a fine enough day.’

Sìneadh Macleod pleated her hair, blonde as the sand, the way her mother had always worked it. ‘If you don’t pleat it,’ her mother had said, ‘that fine hair of yours will end up in Canada.’

This was only one of her rituals. Though her mother had left her the croft and almost all her father’s insurance money, Sìneadh still worked with undirected busyness in the village post office on Mondays and Tuesdays. She helped Donald fish when he craved company over catch. And at half-past seven every Friday in the church hall she taught Gaelic to incomers.

She had three pupils – cosy enough. Tony and Gail were a pillow-faced English couple who were genial, if half-hearted in their learning. Eva was Sìneadh’s age, and had come from somewhere in Europe to clean at the island’s hotel. She was an intense, slight thing. Her eyes were dark and unreadable; it was her long eyebrows, which rose and dipped as Sìneadh taught, that did the talking for them.

Sìneadh took a liking to the three of them. In the cloakroom after the last lesson of summer term, she thought she should show island hospitality and invite them to hers for a drink.

Tony and Gail hummed and hesitated, looked at Eva and finally said they’d love to, another time. But Eva, when she had finished secluding herself under a knitted teal hat and bright scarf, said, ‘I come.’

So the two of them walked towards Sìneadh’s, on this, the longest night of the year, along the bay at the border of beach and tussocky grass. Halfway there Sìneadh stopped by a tall memorial and leaned back against it, looking seawards. She drew in the air, salted and sweetly peat-smoked, through her nose.

‘This is my favourite place,’ she said. ‘I come here every day and talk to myself.’

A hoarse breeze fluttered across the sea, slicing the tips of the waves as it came closer. ‘The view is lovely,’ Eva said, adjusting her hat. ‘And it will be even nicer in summer.’

Sìneadh laughed and snaked her arm inside Eva’s. ‘You’re like my mother. She said we have only two seasons: last winter and next winter.’

They carried on, followed by the crash of the waves on the beach, the ugh-ugh of the gulls and the co-ee, co-ee of the curlews. No-one to be seen. The landscape was upturned: clouds pavement-grey, the sea blue as cloudless sky. Sìneadh took off her shoes and scampered across the sand to the shoreline. She turned, arms and fingers outstretched, inviting Eva to challenge this for beauty. Eva stayed at the beach edge. She said something that by her posture expected a reply. But another gust drew the her words away, so Sìneadh came back up the beach to hear Eva repeat it.

Eva leaned in, clasping her hat, and said, ‘I like your hair.’

The way the blood rose to Sìneadh’s cheeks then, she was glad of the gloaming to hide it.

At the croft, Sìneadh hung Eva’s scarf and hat behind the door. Shorn of them, Eva looked breakable in a black, thin-strapped vest and dark skirt. Her tar-black hair twisted around her ears like seaweed around rocks.

Sìneadh lit two candles for comfort and pulled out biscuits and some cheese and wine. She named them in Gaelic as she passed them to Eva.

It was strange, having someone here. It gave the evening the unreality of a dream. Across the kitchen table, the candlelight softened Eva; turned her ears pinkly translucent and her skin luminous. As if she were a spectator in someone else’s dream, Sìneadh stared at Eva pulling the cheese off the biscuits with her teeth, like a goat; stared at one or other of Eva's straps slipping off a shoulder before being absently pulled back. Only when Eva looked up, her pupils black and round as full-stops, did Sìneadh look away.

Eventually, Sìneadh asked, ‘Why did you come to the island, Eva?’

Eva shrugged. ‘Adventure. I wanted to see remote places. Like your favourite place.’

‘Do you have one? A favourite?’

‘Yes,’ Eva decided. ‘A park in my city. Families picnic in summer. But in winter I go each evening and look across the river. Oh, the art gallery. When there is snow and the lamps make light soft, is beautiful. Not beautiful like here. But beautiful for me. I can think.’

‘What about?’

Eva swallowed the last of her wine and rattled her chair around the table to be next to Sìneadh. ‘Things.’

‘What things?’

‘Things I like.’ The way Eva was looking at Sìneadh cast a warming heat that reddened her face again.

‘What like?’

Eva shrugged. ‘I like lots.’ She began to toy with the end of one of Sìneadh’s pigtails; weighing it in her hand, electrifying the downy hairs on Sìneadh’s arms. ‘I like your hair.’

‘You said.’

‘Okay. I like long legs too.’

‘Legs?’

Eva nodded. ‘And blue eyes and nice mouths.’

When Sìneadh spoke her words fell like trees: ‘That’s nice.’

Eva was focusing stupidly at her. ‘I like you. Tony and Gail, they can tell.’

The whole night was kneeling on Sìneadh with a crushing weight. Eva came in close enough that her eyes seemed to consume her face, then closer still so that everything, briefly, went dark. Her lips touched Sìneadh’s and stayed, the contact dry and slight, until Sìneadh laughed and drew her head back. Her body tickled; instinctively she licked her lips. But she stayed still when Eva returned, head cocked, for a firmer kiss. It was Eva who pulled away this time, but after she stayed close enough that their noses still touched.

Sìneadh had kept her eyes open throughout. She knew it was a quarter past eleven by the cooker clock and still light outside. She was aware too of the silence of the room because of other sounds that told of it: the dog scuffling at the kitchen door, the waves coming in on the beach a hundred yards away.

‘Do that again,’ Sìneadh said.

This time the kiss was like the thunder rolling off the hills in the suddenness of it, the way it lifted them bit by bit off their chairs and echoed into more kisses and unlatched a wildness, a gate blown open. They stood, Eva’s hips already pressed back to the table. Sìneadh’s hands rose to cup Eva’s armpits, which were glassy with sweat. Both straps of Eva’s top tumbled off her shoulders and the strength of their kissing swung Eva back until she was flat on the table, legs over the edge. Sìneadh drew her knee onto the tabletop so they could keep kissing.

When Eva broke their kiss and started to work open the buttons on Sìneadh’s shirt, Sìneadh’s only thought was to mimic her. She yanked at Eva’s top and exposed a breast that was almost smoothed into absence by the way Eva was lying. Shocked, Sìneadh pulled the top back up again. But she could not release the picture of it from her mind; how Eva’s nipple had stood out, firm and long as a fingertip. It made Sìneadh’s insides crazy with want, and she drew the top down again, more slowly this time.

As Eva reached for Sìneadh’s skirt, Sìneadh thought to copy that too, but trapped her hand behind Eva. Jesus this wouldn’t do. Sìneadh, painfully balanced on one knee, couldn’t find space to pull herself up. Even with her arm numb behind Eva, she would not have had the wit to change anything until Eva whispered, ‘Is there anywhere?’

Sìneadh lifted herself up. ‘Yes,’ she said, finally.

Sìneadh helped Eva off the table. Both clutched their disarrayed clothes primly to them with their free hands. When Sìneadh opened the kitchen door, her dog jumped up. ‘That’s Bunky,’ she whispered, as if making polite introductions. Sìneadh dragged Eva through to her bedroom, scared everything would evaporate. With Bunky hurrying around they undressed by the three-quarter bed. It was not until Sìneadh had pulled her final sock off that Eva kissed her again. Joined at the lips they rolled naked onto the mattress, facing each other.

Now they had the freedom to travel, Sìneadh’s kisses became vague. She planted a fortnight’s worth of them around Eva’s neck, while an inarticulate hand tumbled down, first resting at the crease where Eva’s leg and arse met, then further in, towards a slippery heat. There the fingertips camped, grasping wet skin.

Eva was more confident. Her fingers drum-rolled down Sìneadh’s spine, twisted in front, raking through a dust of hair to reach Sìneadh’s entrance. Eva drew her finger up and down between the lips, until her middle finger curled inside, while her pinky and thumb poked out wide enough to touch each thigh. Sìneadh’s body hesitated. But she was hellishly slick and it was too late: Eva quickly established a rocking rhythm, and when her forefinger pushed in too, Sìneadh’s response was to roll on her back, slacken her legs and let them drift apart.

While she fingered Sìneadh, Eva kissed her from chin to collar-bone. Sìneadh’s breasts rose above her like conical hills, pink-capped where the snow-line would be. Eva swallowed one whole. When it bounced out again, shining, its glossy nipple was in a springing bud. Eva’s mouth returned, lips loose around it, and tongued an attentive circle. Sìneadh sighed. Then there were more kisses, light along Sìneadh’s flanks, over her hips and down the front of her thighs.

Eva withdrew her fingers and hooked her hands under the back of Sìneadh’s knees and drew them up, sharply folding Sìneadh’s body in two. Sìneadh wanted to say enough, but her body was pliant. Eva licked between Sìneadh’s legs – short licks that kept coming north – and Sìneadh felt her body abandon her: the bones slackened, the muscles around were melted by the heat of her own blood, and still Eva licked on, along the slit till it reached the nub. At that touch and the touch that followed it felt to Sìneadh that the sea was inside her, breaking in great waves, roaring in her ears and right now she was on the tip of one of those waves, clamouring for help. Everything was senseless. She was nowhere yet wanted to be nowhere else.

And then it was over, marked by a shivering sweat condensing all over her body. Eva was above her, smiling curiously. She was gently tugging a pigtail, pulling the elastic off.

‘I think you like me too,’ she said.

How real Eva was. Soft, yet with limbs firmer than Sìneadh had imagined. As Sìneadh scattered soft kisses over Eva she noticed the way the light from outside caught Eva’s ribcage and made it disappear and reappear with each short breath that Eva took. Under the run of Sìneadh’s hand, Eva was like an instrument, not just in the gentle curve and taper of her body, but in her responsiveness, the way she let out musical sighs when Sìneadh touched a nipple – too tentatively, she could tell – or kissed across Eva’s waist, tongue flicking into Eva’s dark belly-button which tasted of sea salt. From there, Sìneadh’s mouth weaved to the thigh bone and back in to a nest of pubic hair, where she smelled Eva’s scent. Sìneadh’s tongue worked along this border, with the softness of warm skin on one side of her tongue, the tickle of hair along the other. Her tongue dragged over the rise of Eva’s mound to the top of her lips, encouraged all the time by Eva clawing the back of her head. Down again, along dainty, unkempt lips, following the glistening line, tongue curved along this crease, wetness like glue. And even lower, below Eva’s pussy, blindly drawn into the darkness between her cheeks and the mattress. Sìneadh licked there, fluttering her tongue against the moistness that ran onto it, like a rain in a gutter. Back up Sìneadh came, travelling in clumsy cat-licks, back along the lips that Eva was now holding apart – and there was Eva’s clit, impossibly big and erect. As Sìneadh lay her tongue flat on it, Eva’s breathing, which had started as puffs of breeze, found its sound in a grating rattle.

Reassured, Sìneadh carried on, along the length of that lovely erect clitoris, down again, up over the belly, around the nipples, up to Eva’s chin, cheek, her forehead, her lips. Their noses banged. Eva’s answer was all teeth, biting Sìneadh’s ears, licking the sweated, golden strands that stuck to Sìneadh’s neck.

At this moment their bodies aligned, one above the other, so their nipples brushed together, sending through Sìneadh a shock as sharp as pain, but impossibly pleasurable. They pressed into each other and Sìneadh was reluctant to move, other than to reach her fingers behind her and between Eva’s legs, rubbing in small circles that Sìneadh knew she was doing right because she was guided by Eva’s sounds and her movements; the way she clutched. And finally Eva shouted something in her own language and sucked at the air, her muscles jerking and hard, pushing into Sìneadh for a long minute.

Some time later Sìneadh lay blinking in the darkless night, once more convinced she was in someone else’s dream. She was snug against Eva, all along her body, with one arm around her, holding her. Maybe it was Eva’s nipple, still firm and long, that encouraged Sìneadh to draw her palm over it to feel again its hardness; maybe it was that movement that first excited Eva. However it happened, Eva stretched and twisted around and kissed Sìneadh strangely, tongue already out, dragging it across Sìneadh’s lips, up to her nostrils, before dipping into her mouth.

Their kissing became greedy again. They breathed harshly out of their noses. Their limbs squabbled; their knees crashed and their legs sprawled wide and wider, outstretching each other until, by lifting Sìneadh’s leg, Eva could slot herself into the gap between them. Scissored like this and holding hands they ground against each other and became one understanding body bent on the same goal, each of them so wet that their bodies made sucking noises as they rubbed, louder than their gasping breaths. The next day, thinking back, it was this recollection that would make Sìneadh blush most fiercely.

But at that moment more waves of ungovernable delight came back to lap at Sìneadh. Her limbs locked. She did not breathe until the swelling moment had risen beyond her and almost made her cry and covered her once more in a frost of sweat. And Eva too, clutching Sìneadh’s fingers by the very tips, was twitching, grasping at breaths. In the end, all there was was a low, grieving moan and Eva slumped, useless, in Sìneadh’s arms.

It was not that there was an end to the night and a start to the morning, but Sìneadh stepped though to run a bath so there could at least be a before and after. She wanted to think of nothing, to empty her mind, but could not because fresh things kept tumbling into it.

And anyway, as soon as she was up to her neck in hot water the door opened and Eva came in, as if blown by the wind, wearing one of Sìneadh’s t-shirts. Eva perched on the toilet for a minute, then over to the basin where she leaned in, pulled down her lower lip and examined it in the mirror. ‘You bit me,’ she said.

With her head just above the bubbles, Sìneadh looked at Eva at first with resentment; a wish to be alone again. But her eyes followed Eva’s honeyed limbs below that familiar t-shirt and stayed on the pale boyish bottom, sharply cleaved into the halves she’d clutched during the night. Between those legs there was a fluff of hair, like a stalactite. She watched Eva pick up a toothbrush and skirt it around her teeth. Eva spat in the basin, turned to face Sìneadh and crossed her arms to pull up the t-shirt. Eva’s high breasts, like upturned cups, appeared out of nowhere from her naked body as she lowered her arms. Sìneadh watched that flat tummy above a black triangle of hair and in this sober morning light the thought that Eva was still beautiful lit a flame of desire under Sìneadh that burned shame away.

Eva approached the bath, stretched one leg over the rim and, gripping the sides, dipped her foot in. She levered herself over, her stray leg crooked. She squatted, chittering and huddling at the end. Sìneadh squeaked sideways to let Eva stretch beside her.

‘I have come for more Gaelic lessons,’ Eva said. She pushed her palm through the bubbles to first expose, then cover, Sìneadh’s white breast. ‘What is this?’

‘Cíoch,’ Sìneadh said, her eyes on the hand.

‘Kee-och,’ Eva repeated. Her shining hand sunk below the bubbles, their fingers raking Sìneadh’s tummy and squeezing between her legs. Eva looked up again, a dark eyebrow curled.

‘Baltan,’ said Sìneadh, now looking at Eva.

Eva smiled. She repeated the pronunciation – pool-tan.

They lay for a minute and Sìneadh felt Eva’s middle finger testing her between her legs. Sìneadh gasped when the finger finally slid in.

‘What am I doing now?’ asked Eva. She withdrew her finger until only the tip was touching, then pushed in again.

Sìneadh, mute, clutched the side of the bath and slid, kicking her left leg over the rim to open herself.

Eva teased more, drawing her finger to the clit to make Sìneadh shudder, before returning to curl deep inside again. ‘What am I doing?’ Eva repeated, in a whisper.

In Sìneadh’s floundering, she grabbed Eva and found a way between her legs. Eva’s mouth fell wetly open onto Sìneadh’s. Their tongues were little serpents in the way they twisted and like this they masturbated each other, splashing like otters, their legs clenched on each other, the water breaching the rim of the bath in waves and flooding the floor until the two of them were trembling in the near-empty bath and giggling and moaning with their mouths so close to each other that it was a chorus.

‘Bualadh craigeann,’ Sìneadh said. ‘That’s what you were doing to me in the bath. That’s what we have done every day since. Fucking.’

It was a rare hot day and they lay naked on the banks of the fairy loch. Sìneadh’s mother had called it that because Sìneadh could believe the fairies swam there, it was that small. The loch lay in a tiny glen, sheltered from the wind and reached by a trackless path. Only Sìneadh had ever come to this silent pool.

‘That is what fucking means in Gaelic?’ Eva shielded the sun from her eyes with her forearm.

Sìneadh propped herself up on her elbows. ‘Literally it means ‘beating the skin’.’

‘Beating the skin.’ Eva repeated. She closed her eyes and smiled. ‘You Scottish. So violent.’

They were both still goose-fleshed and dripping from their dip, still breathing hard and fast. Eva lay like a lizard, revelling in this unexpected summer warmth. Her brown body was silvered by the sunlight. She was painfully beautiful to Sìneadh, all sex, those shallow curves so obviously right, those nipples always erect, always wanting touched. One of Eva’s legs was outstretched, the other bent and yawning lazily and indecently away from her.

The way Eva had slipped into her life these past weeks, unobtrusive and vital as a bookmark. All summer they had been together. They had walked the cliffs the length of the island and skinny-dipped here on rare glorious days. Eva liked to touch and they had held hands through the village. It had surprised Sìneadh the way the villagers had taken to them. When she and Eva sat together in the pub, no-one stared. Even those who might otherwise have disapproved did not complain because no-one had seen Sìneadh’s smile or laugh so much.

‘Of all of us,’ one said, ‘Sìneadh deserves a go at happiness. How she has coped I don’t know. Her poor father. Poor mother. All that heartbreak.’

Every day, Sìneadh found out more about Eva. Where her skin was coldest – her toes, waist and behind the knees – and most sensitive; that point on Eva’s neck that would make her twitch when touched. The way Eva was taken aback by pleasure every time she was licked. She would pull one knee up and look down and her expressive eyebrows would arch each time in fresh surprise that such pleasure could be caused by the tiniest flick of Sìneadh’s tongue. Sìneadh had learned the familiar double-twitch of Eva’s hips as she was about to come and the reassurance of her clawing fingers. Other habits too: the way Eva sugared her tea crazily, holding the spoon far above her cup before tipping it. The way she tucked her hair behind her ear when she wanted to be held. The way she slept, childlike, with a thumb in her mouth, or clinging to a single finger of Sìneadh’s hand.

Yet there was always a want to know more. Sìneadh knew nothing about Eva’s past. There was no talk of it. When Eva walked around the croft singing, it was in a language Sìneadh did not understand.

‘What will happen to us?’ Sìneadh had asked in the bath one morning before work. Eva was facing her, leaning over, her mouth at Sìneadh’s ear, squashing it between her lips, pressing her tongue inside.

Eva whispered in her ear, ‘We do not need a map to show us where we are going. I have never been this happy.’ She painted bubbles onto Sìneadh’s nose. Eva had this way about her, a thoughtlessness, or at least an ability to never think ahead or behind. All this an adventure. Sìneadh envied that.

Here, by the fairy loch, Eva was reaching to pluck blackberries from the bush next to her. One after the other into her mouth. She would sicken herself.

‘Let me taste,’ Sìneadh said.

Eva twisted onto her front and shimmied across the grass. She pulled herself above Sìneadh and between her legs, elbows either side of Sìneadh’s head. With her finger Eva levered Sìneadh’s chin down to open her mouth. Eva hung her tongue down and a trail of blackberry pulp slid off it into Sìneadh’s mouth; a thick string of it that was just spit by the end. Eva followed the last of it down so it became a kiss. Hours later, when Sìneadh ran her tongue around her teeth, feeling for the last of the blackberry seed, the taste would remind her of late summer.

When Eva broke away she said, ‘I like feeding you. Know why?’

Sìneadh swallowed the blackberries and shook her head.

‘Because I love you.’

Sìneadh drew Eva to her shoulder, holding her perfect weight on top of her. They lay for minutes more, Eva’s hair still dripping on Sìneadh’s skin.

‘What will I do without you?’ Sìneadh said.

The island was heedless of autumn whistling in and the leaves becoming flowers in themselves. But Sìneadh knew the very length of these nights; she’d wake before first peep of day and peek out the bedroom window. From there she could see the memorial and part of the beach rise out of the night. The love she had for this place, her islanders, was uncomplicated and unchanging; a solid thing under her control. But when she looked back to Eva, shaped like a starfish in bed, limbs at impossible angles, what she felt was frightening and inexplicable in its boundlessness.

On those sleepless nights Sìneadh could see the shadows of Eva’s shoulder blades still and shift in the thin light; her swooping, fishbone spine. She would always be a mystery, and the hallmarks of a history Sìneadh could never know began to taunt her. She was jealous of unshared years. That hollow in Eva’s arm near her shoulder where she’d had her immunisation jags –  had she cried? The tiny crescent birthmark above her bottom, barely visible against her golden skin – who else had kissed this?

It was a fear of falling with no sense of depth that made Sìneadh throw out her arms to arrest her fall. On the nights when this feeling bit hardest, she pulled on a dressing-gown, crept to the kitchen and perched on a stool to watch the kettle boil. But there was always too much thinking to be done, so she’d take a cloth and wipe every surface clean.

Eva came in on one of those mornings, bleary and beautiful. She was opening the fridge when Sìneadh came out with it: ‘You want me to say I love you, don’t you?’

Eva closed the fridge door, smiling. ‘Yes.’

‘First tell me how many others you’ve loved.’

‘How many have I loved?’ Eva turned, confused. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Love can’t mean much if you don’t know.’

‘Maybe one. Two. It does not matter. Nothing like you. I love you.’ Eva emphasised these last three words with a deliberate nod.

‘Love won’t stop you leaving me.’

Eva put her arms around Sìneadh’s neck. ‘Why would I leave when I have found what I looked for?’

Sìneadh had worked up such a sweat of worry that these words released her. She took Eva’s arms and pinned them to the fridge and kissed her so hard their teeth clattered. Eva’s dressing gown fell open and Sìneadh’s hands were at Eva’s waist and rose higher. Eva responded, drawing them both down to the tiles where Sìneadh was at Eva with her mouth, tasting up the back of her legs. Eva twisted her body to meet Sìneadh’s tongue, pulling one leg up, the calf falling limp. Sìneadh’s mouth was right at the back of Eva now, between her cheeks, into the little dark hole of her arse and licking there too, before going up her back, looking to consume her. Only Eva’s clever hands and lips calmed Sìneadh into submission. Only Eva’s knowing fingers, rubbing Sìneadh’s clit in little circles brought an end to things and they lay on the cold tiles, looking at each other.

But in a few hours, the rawness returned. Sìneadh snapped at Eva and went for a walk alone and did not return until it was dark. Next morning Sìneadh was again sitting in the kitchen, this time holding her head in her hands, with a hollow resentment burning in her and hating herself for it.

When Eva came in and asked what was wrong Sìneadh had to tell her. She looked out of the kitchen window. ‘I am scared of being in love with you,’ she said. A trembling spread across her whole body. ‘I can’t sleep for fear of losing you.’

‘You will not lose me.’

But Sìneadh was shaking her head. ‘I will.’

‘Trust me.’

But Sìneadh’s voice had risen. ‘I can’t stand it, do you hear me? I don’t want to love you. I want you to go.’

It was Donald who told her, a week later, on the fishing boat.

‘Your friend has gone home,’ he said.

Sìneadh was looking over the side at the time. Donald told Angus later that did he not see her react, other than to tuck her hands in her pockets.

‘These things happen,’ she said.

Later, back at home, Sìneadh had a passing sense that Eva was still there, in the casual disarray of things. Her presence was so strongly felt that Sìneadh made two cups of tea and pulled the sugar out for one. It was a bleak moment. But Sìneadh told herself these traces would disappear eventually, like the claw-marks of birds in snow. There would be reminders for a while yet – just on the way to bed that night Sìneadh noticed Eva’s hat and scarf still hanging inside the door, as they’d been left that first night.

But it was better this way. Shut it out and carry on.

Each year for the past ten years, there was a gathering on the first of December to remember the dozen men from among them who had died in the fishing disaster. The villagers huddled in a narrow column in the lee of the memorial. In this way they were shielded from the furious sleet that drove in off the sea at the lot of them.

As the survivor of the tragedy, it was Donald’s place to speak. Though he was not normally much for words, Sìneadh liked to tell him that when he spoke of that terrible night there was an eloquence about him. It was as if – this was Sìneadh’s private belief – as if he was having his words whispered to him by those who did not come back. It was why she always paid attention when Donald looked her way and said, as he did every year, that no-one could measure the love the fishermen had for their families and how, though the sea had claimed them, though they could no longer express that love, it lived on in their absence.

After everyone had gone, Sìneadh walked to the front of the memorial. With her gloved hand she drew an ‘L’ shape, first down the list of the dead – all those Macleods – then, removing her glove, across the raised letters of one name.

She talked away, as she always did. But the only answer was the bitter sleet at the back of her head; the only feeling that continued absence of love. It was a feeling her mother had mentioned towards the end and it was when she remembered this that Sìneadh knew she had to leave the island.

Angus took the pictures. Janet at the Post Office helped check everything and in the end the passport was ready before Sìneadh was. Within three weeks she was handing Bunky to the neighbour and shutting up her croft. In a final act of closure on the freezing morning of departure, Sìneadh took Eva’s hat and scarf from inside the door and put them on.

An hour later she was on the water, at the stern of Donald Macleod’s boat, looking back at the point she’d last seen the harbour. A knot of villagers had gathered there in the black of morning on hearing she was away, finally. Janet had clutched her hand and said, ‘What’s for you won’t go by you.’

Donald did not break into her thoughts all journey, but when they landed on the mainland, with dawn only just coming up, he hugged her and said, ‘May your happiness have company,’ an old saying of his.

Sìneadh’s spirits lifted from there, because it was all new rather than old. On the train and on the aeroplane and even in the taxi she was always looking out of the window.

That same afternoon she was in Eva’s city. With no forwarding address to follow, Sìneadh was pulling on a thread of chance: that Eva had come home, and once there she would go to the favourite place she had told Sìneadh about. Fate was the guide: if Sìneadh could find that place, she would find Eva.

Sìneadh found the city’s best vantage point by walking uphill when she could and at last the city spread below her like a frozen sea. The sight made her giddy, not just by its extent, but through the knowledge that Eva was somewhere in this landscape and later tonight she would surely be in the park across from the art gallery. Sìneadh knew this because every instinct told her so. The snow had come to make it beautiful and she had a map to find Eva’s park. With cobweb movements of her hand, Sìneadh spread the map flat and smiled. It was not true what Eva had said that time in the bath. Maps were vital if you needed to know where to go.

She spotted the gallery immediately, right by her thumb on the map. Yet there was another gallery, next to her forefinger. Here was one more. Sìneadh’s eyes scurried over the map. A dozen galleries were dotted across the city. And as for parks – a score of green blotches, everywhere. Sìneadh looked up. How would she find the right one?

There was a moment of panic before she began to draw her thumb in lines across the map, from the river to parks to gallery, from parks to river, working it out. Hope returned: only a few galleries were close enough to a park to be seen from it. Only two were on opposite banks of the river. Only one within walking distance.

The sun was already setting as Sìneadh crossed the city bridge. The park was just the other side and when she got there, it was empty. The snow lay untouched. There was, at least, a bench and when Sìneadh sat down at it she could see the gallery. But there was no Eva.

Across the bridge, the crowds thinned, the hum of traffic lulled. On this, the longest night of the year, it was almost dark and already chill. The park lights flickered on and threw a yellow glow across the snow, and there was a lonely beauty about the place. Sìneadh tugged the scarf around her, pulled Eva’s hat lower and continued to sit, unable to give up. Still Eva did not come. It was too late. But Sìneadh would not leave, though tiredness kept drawing her eyes closed.

It was in that half-asleep state that she believed she heard a crunch of footsteps to her left, but it was only a bush waving in the shadows. And yet, beyond that, another silhouette shifted and seemed to approach the bench. It was someone, definitely. Sìneadh’s whole body become a sort of prayer. When the shape was a few feet away and passed under a light, Sìneadh’s insides jumped against her skin.

It was Eva.

Eva stopped. Looked at the scarf;  looked at the hat, and finally those dark circles of impenetrable black lifted and looked at Sìneadh. For a second nothing moved, and then Eva tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and her eyebrows began to fold inwards.

‘You,’ Eva said, so softly Sìneadh thought she might have imagined it.

Sìneadh stood. ‘This view,’ she said. She swallowed, twice, and cleared her throat. It was all too much. ‘This view,’ she said, ‘will be nicer in summer.’