He was here because it was his job to be here, she thought bleakly. He had nothing to do with her.

‘Aren’t you needed back at the pavilion?’ she asked, and his gaze didn’t falter.

‘I thought I might be needed here. With you.’

‘There’s nothing to do here. The light’s still working.’

‘You really are the lighthouse-keeper?’

‘Like father, like daughter. Yes.’

‘Morag, I’m sorry.’

She had no idea what he was sorry for. So many things…She had no idea where he intended to start.

‘Don’t be sorry,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t help.’

‘This is your house?’ He gazed at the battered whitewashed buildings. The light was fading fast now, and the beam from the lighthouse was becoming more obvious, one brief, hard beam out over the waves each fifteen seconds. The waves were washing gently over the rocks, their soft lapping making a mockery of the wave that had come before.

From where they stood you couldn’t see around the headland into the town. The ruins were hardly apparent-unless you stared into the smashed windows of the cottage and saw the chaos that had been her home.

‘Do you need to do anything for the lighthouse?’ he asked, and she shook her head.

‘No. The electricity’s cut but we have solar power back-up. The solar panels on the cottage roof seem to be just under the high-water mark, and the connections must still be intact. That was what I was most worried about. I needed to check that the light was OK.’

‘To stop further tragedy?’

‘Without the light…yes, there’d be further tragedy.’ She gazed across the great white tower, following its lines down to where it was anchored on solid rock. ‘It doesn’t look harmed. One wave couldn’t wash it away. Unlike…’

‘Unlike the rest of the island.’ He hesitated, watching her face as she turned again to face the wreckage of her home. ‘It was some wave.’

‘It was the most frightening thing I’ve ever seen,’ she whispered. ‘I thought everyone would be dead. I couldn’t believe that so many would live. But still…there’s so much…’ She let herself think of the lists Marcus had held-and the name that among them all had her cringing the most. Doctors shouldn’t get personal, she thought. Ha!

Somewhere there was a little boy called Hamish. Robbie’s best friend.

Enough. The little boy had probably been found by now, and even if he hadn’t, she couldn’t let herself think past a point where madness seemed to beckon. She gathered herself tight, allowing anger to replace distress. ‘Why aren’t you back at the pavilion? I wouldn’t have left if I thought you and Jaqui weren’t staying.’

‘We have things under control and I can get back fast if I’m needed,’ he told her. He was still watching her face. ‘There’s two doctors on the Chinook-the helicopter we’re using to evacuate the worst of the wounded. We’re evacuating those now. Peter and Christine Rafferty. Iris Helgin. Ross Farr. You’ve done a great job, Morag, but multiple fractures and internal injuries need specialist facilities.’

She nodded. ‘How about Lucy Rafferty?’ she asked tightly. ‘Did she go with her parents?’ Peter and Christine had been badly hurt-Peter with a badly fractured leg and Christine with concussion as well as fractures, but their thirteen-year-old daughter hadn’t seemed as badly hurt.

And their son? Hamish? She thought the question but she didn’t add it out loud.

‘We didn’t have room for Lucy,’ Grady was saying. ‘And we thought-’

She nodded, cutting him off. She knew what he thought.

‘And Sam?’ she managed. He could hear how involved she was, she thought. He must do.

But so what? she demanded of herself. The medical imperative-not to get personally involved-how on earth could she ever manage that here?

‘You can’t act at peak professional level if your emotions get in the way,’ she’d been taught in medical school, and she wondered what her examiners would think of the way she was reacting now.

Well, it was too late to fail her. They were welcome to try.

‘We’re making sure Sam’s stable before we transfer him,’ Grady was saying. ‘But he’ll make it. I’m sure he’ll make it.’

‘Without his leg,’ she whispered. ‘No more fishing.’

‘But still a life.’

‘Maybe.’ She stared again at the ruins of her cottage. The water had smashed its way everywhere. Through gaps where once there’d been window-panes, she could see a mass of sand and mud and sludge a yard deep.

Where to start…

Robbie.

Hamish. Dear God.

‘I need to find my nephew,’ she said bleakly.

‘Beth’s child?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where is he?’ Grady asked, and then added, more urgently, ‘Morag, do you know where he is?’

What was he thinking? she thought incredulously. That she’d only now thought of the little boy’s whereabouts?

‘Of course I know where he is,’ she snapped. ‘I never would have left him if he hadn’t been safe. I would have stayed. But I had to go. Sam…Hamish…the others. But Hubert will take care…’

She wasn’t making sense, even to herself. Grady looked at her, his face intent and serious in the fading light.

‘So he’s with someone called Hubert. Where’s Hubert?’

‘Up on the ridge above the town. Hubert’s cottage is the high point of the island. I was up there when…’

‘When you saw the wave,’ Grady said. ‘You were very lucky. Marcus told me what happened. If it hadn’t been for your quick thinking…’

‘Yeah, if I hadn’t been here,’ she said, and it was impossible to keep the bitterness from her voice. ‘If I hadn’t been where I belonged, we’d all be dead. But I was. Now, if you’ll excuse me, Grady, I need to find my nephew.’

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘No.’

‘Yes,’ he said, and he took her hand, whether she liked it or not. ‘You’re as much a victim as anyone else on this island, Morag. Your home is in ruins. You possess only the clothes you stand up in. You’re shocked and you’re exhausted. I’m taking you in charge. We’ll go up together and fetch Robbie and then I’ll take you to the tents they’re setting up on the cricket grounds to care for all of you. Learn to accept help, Morag. You’ll have to take it over the next few weeks, like it or not.’

She stared at him. Helpless. Lost. And when he held her hand tighter, she didn’t pull away.

She was going to need this man over the next few weeks? Right. She did need him.

The only problem was that it wasn’t just for now. She’d needed him for four long years and that need had never faded.

She’d needed him then and she needed him desperately now.

Grady.

Her love.

It was all a mist, she thought. A delirious dream where horror and death and Grady and love-and sheer unmitigated hopelessness-all mingled.


They had to walk up the fells, scrambling up the scree to Hubert’s cottage. The goat track was hard to find in the dim light. Grady had a flashlight and it picked out the path.

He held onto her hand all the way. To do otherwise seemed stupid. The fact that his touch made her sense of unreality deepen couldn’t be allowed to matter.

Maybe she should release herself from his grip, she thought inconsequentially. She wasn’t nervous of the dark. Brought up to know every nook and cranny on the island, Morag was as at home here as she was in the city on a well-lit street. Grady needed the flashlight but she let her feet move automatically.

Dear heaven, this was so dreadful…

The thought of Angie kept filling her vision. Angie’s tiny cold baby. And Mavis. And so many dead…

And Hamish?

No.

She couldn’t think. Somehow she blocked her thoughts until the only thing she was aware of was the presence of this man beside her.

It helped. It stopped her getting her head around what had happened this day.

So much had happened since she’d last walked up here that Morag was having trouble believing that any of this was real. This afternoon she’d strolled up the path with Robbie by her side, happy because it was a glorious Sunday afternoon and the island was the best place to be in the entire world. Robbie had kicked his soccer ball along in front of him, letting it roll down the scree, whooping and hollering and occasionally returning to her side to keep up his latest plea for a puppy.

‘Please, Morag. We need a puppy. We need a dog. We need…’

Then there’d been the talk of Elspeth.

I wonder how many island dogs have survived? she thought, and then thought even more savagely, I wonder how many dogs need new owners?

Her head was right back into the tragedy. How could she escape it?

‘It’ll be OK.’

‘How can it be all right?’ she said into the night, not really talking to Grady. She was talking to herself. ‘How can things be righted? So much destroyed…’

‘The chopper pilot on the way over said there’d been talk of resettling the islanders,’ Grady said cautiously. ‘Making this an unpopulated island. With so much of the infrastructure damaged, maybe that’d be the way to go.’

Oh, right. Smash homes and then rip the island out from under them.

‘Yeah, the government would like that,’ she said bitterly. ‘It costs them an arm and a leg in support-to have ships drop off supplies, to provide things like mail, telecommunications, health services…’

‘You are the health services.’

‘I know, and if I wasn’t here they’d close the island in a minute,’ she told him. ‘They’ve decided again that the lighthouse can manage unmanned. They don’t want to provide infrastructure and it drives the powers that be nuts that I agreed to stay here. I’m the only reason this island can function.’ She shook herself, trying to lose the feeling of nightmarish unreality. ‘And now there’ll be more pressure. How the hell can we rebuild? All these people? There’ll be so many problems. I can’t cope…’

‘Hey, Morag.’ His hand tightened on hers, holding her, steadying her as she stumbled along a track which all of a sudden wasn’t as familiar as she’d thought. And, dammit, she was too far gone to pull away. Sure, it was his bedside manner doing the comforting, but she needed any bedside manner she could get.