Read Chapter 38: The Apology

The ferry schedule was merciless—one crossing a day, leaving at eight in the morning, returning at six in the evening. Freya had stared at the laminated timetable pinned to the kitchen wall of the cottage for a full ten minutes before she’d worked up the nerve to knock on Alistair’s door.

He’d answered with tea still in hand, his hair damp from a shower, and she’d simply held up the letter.

“I found this,” she said. “In Duncan’s logbook. Hidden.”

His face had gone through three stages—confusion, recognition of the handwriting, and then something raw she couldn’t name. He’d read it standing in the doorway, the morning light catching the tremble in his fingers.

“She’s alive,” he’d said. Not a question.

“She’s on Eriskay. Has been for years.”

He’d read the letter again, then the Morse code annotations in the margins, and when he finally looked up, his eyes were wet. “He knew. All this time, he knew.”

Now they sat side by side on the hard plastic bench of the small ferry, the Sound of Barra churning grey-green beneath them. The boat smelled of diesel and salt and wet wool, and neither of them had spoken since they’d watched Eriskay rise from the horizon.

“What do I even say to her?” Alistair’s voice cracked. He hadn’t shaved. The stubble made him look younger, more vulnerable. “Thirty years. I stood in that church and watched them lower an empty coffin because she was supposed to be in it. And I blamed myself. I blamed Duncan.”

“The letter says she knows,” Freya said quietly. “Duncan told her everything. She wrote to him, not to you, because she didn’t want to—” She paused, consulting the memory of the faded ink. “She says she didn’t want to force you into a forgiveness you hadn’t earned yet. She wanted you to come to her when you were ready.”

A bitter laugh escaped him. “Thirty years to get ready.”

“You’re here now.”

The ferry shuddered against the concrete jetty, and Alistair stood, steadying himself against the rail. Freya watched him gather himself—the slight straightening of his shoulders, the way he tucked the letter into his jacket pocket like a talisman.

They’d called ahead from the post office on Barra. Eilidh MacNeil had a croft on the north end of the island, a pale stone house facing the Atlantic. She’d answered the phone herself, and when Freya had explained who she was calling for, there had been a long silence, followed by a single word: “Come.”

The path to the croft was muddy, rutted by tractor wheels, lined with ragged hedges of sea thrift and wind-bent grass. Alistair walked ahead of Freya, his boots squelching in the peat, his hands shoved deep in his pockets. She let him lead. Whatever was about to happen, it belonged to him.

The woman waiting at the gate was not what Freya had pictured. She’d imagined a ghost, a figure frozen in time at nineteen, hair still dark, eyes still bright with youth. Instead, Eilidh MacNeil was sixty, short and sturdy, with grey-streaked hair pulled back in a practical knot and the kind of sun-seamed face that spoke of a lifetime of working outdoors. She wore a battered waxed jacket and rubber boots, and she held a pair of pruning shears in one hand like she might offer them as a weapon or a gift.

Alistair stopped five feet from her. Neither of them spoke.

Freya hung back, near the gate, wanting to give them space but unwilling to leave entirely. She watched Eilidh’s eyes travel over Alistair’s face—searching for his brother, she realized, finding echoes and absences.

“You look like Duncan,” Eilidh said finally. Her voice was low, roughened by sea air. “Around the eyes.”

Alistair flinched. “Everyone says that.”

“It’s not an accusation.” She set down the shears and wiped her hands on her trousers. “You’d better come in. The kettle’s on.”

The cottage interior was warm and cluttered in the way of a home well-lived-in—books stacked on windowsills, drying herbs hanging from the rafters, a half-finished tapestry draped over a chair. Eilidh poured tea into mismatched cups and set a plate of shortbread on the table between them. She moved with deliberate calm, as if she’d rehearsed this moment for years and knew exactly what to do.

Freya positioned herself by the window, nursing her cup, becoming a piece of furniture.

“I didn’t know,” Alistair said. The words came out rough, scraped. “All those years, I thought you—I thought you’d drowned because I wasn’t there. Because I’d left the party early, because I hadn’t walked you home, because—” He stopped, swallowed. “Duncan never told me.”

“Duncan did what he had to do.” Eilidh’s voice was firm but kind. “He was the only one who knew the truth. He helped me get off the island, found me a place here with his aunt’s cousin. He visited when he could. Sent money when he couldn’t.”

“But why?” The question tore out of Alistair. “Why did you leave? Why did you let everyone believe you were dead?”

Eilidh was silent for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice had dropped. “I found out I was pregnant. A week before the storm. The father—” She paused, and Freya saw something flicker across her face, a shadow of the girl she’d been. “He was a married man. Older. I was nineteen and terrified. I knew the island. I knew what everyone would say. What my family would say. So I made a choice. Duncan helped me because he was the only one who knew, and he was the only one who never judged me for it.”

Alistair’s hands were shaking. “The baby?”

“A daughter.” Eilidh’s face softened. “She lives in Glasgow now. Three grandchildren. She’s a teacher.” She reached across the table, and Alistair let her take his hand. “Duncan was her godfather. He came to her christening. I have photographs if you want to see them.”

The silence that followed was heavy with years, with all the letters never written and the conversations never had. Freya watched Alistair’s shoulders begin to shake, silent tears tracking down his face. Eilidh rose from her chair and came around the table, and she held him the way a sister might, one hand cradling the back of his head.

“There’s nothing to forgive,” she murmured into his shoulder. “You were a boy. We were all just children, making the best of what we had.”

When Alistair finally pulled back, his face was blotched and wet, but there was something new in his eyes—a clarity Freya hadn’t seen before. He dug in his jacket pocket and pulled out the compass, Duncan’s compass, its brass case glinting in the low light.

“This was Duncan’s,” he said. “He had it with him when he died. I’ve carried it for years, thinking it was punishment. It was—it was a promise, wasn’t it? He meant to come back for you. He meant to tell me.”

Eilidh touched the compass with reverent fingers. “He said it was our secret. Pointed north, he said. Always north. No matter what happened, we’d both know the way home.” She looked up at Alistair. “He’d have wanted you to point north too, Alistair. Not back at the past. Forward.”

Freya set down her cup. Her chest ached with the weight of what she’d witnessed, and she felt suddenly like an intruder on sacred ground. She moved toward the door, intending to step outside, give them more privacy, but Eilidh’s voice stopped her.

“You’re the filmmaker, aren’t you? The one who’s been telling the island’s story.”

Freya turned. “Yes.”

Eilidh smiled, and it transformed her face. “Duncan wrote about you. In his letters, toward the end. He said there was a woman who’d come to the island with a camera and a stubborn streak, and he thought she might be the one to finally get Alistair to stop brooding.” Her smile deepened. “He was usually right about people.”

Freya felt heat rise to her cheeks. “I don’t know about that.”

“The letter,” Alistair said quietly. “The one I found. It said—it said you have to find me yourself. In your own time.” He looked at Eilidh. “I think I understand now. Duncan wanted me to let go of the guilt. But he also wanted me to choose. To come here because I wanted the truth, not because I was running from it.”

Eilidh nodded slowly. “He knew you better than you knew yourself.”

They stayed another hour. Eilidh fetched a worn photo album from a cupboard, and they pored over pictures of a girl growing up, a wedding, christenings, birthdays—a life that would never have existed if Eilidh had stayed. Alistair asked questions, a hundred of them, and she answered each one with patience and warmth.

Freya watched him begin to put himself back together, piece by piece.

On the ferry home, the sky had turned amber and rose, the sea streaked with gold. Alistair sat beside Freya, his arm pressed against hers, and for a long time neither of them spoke. When he finally did, his voice was quiet but stable.

“She said Duncan kept our mother’s letters. In a box. She’s going to send them to me.”

Freya turned her head. And it was the kind of amber light, the enduring warmth in it, that made her realize—

“It’s not just closure, is it?” she asked. “It’s the beginning of something.”

Alistair looked at her, and his smile carried no shadows. “He wasn’t punishing me, Freya. He was waiting for me to be ready.” He slid his hand into hers, and she could feel the steady warmth of him, the calm that had replaced the turmoil. “I’m ready. For all of it.”

They rounded the headland, Eriskay sinking into the dusk behind them, and Freya thought of the letter in her bag—the hidden one she hadn’t shown him, the one that had fallen from the logbook after Eilidh’s. It was dated a month before Duncan’s death, written in a steady hand that didn’t tremble even when drawing the map of the cave system beneath the white island. She’d barely had time to read it before she’d come to his door.

*How do you tell a man who just found his brother’s hidden mercy that his brother was also hiding something else? That Duncan had known the storms were coming, and he’d let Alistair believe Eilidh’s death was a coincidence?*

The lighthouse light cut through the twilight ahead, steady and sure.

She’d have to tell him. But not tonight.