her decision, but somehow, she’d never been able to let go of the torment of what she had done. And not unlike the sheep in front of her, with their own indelible crosses on their backs, she had also felt marked forever with the pain and the shame.
As she entered the house, the smell of burning peat and the heat from the kitchen range stretched out its fingers to warm her frigid cheeks. Wandering into the kitchen to help her aunt with the stew, she settled her heart to enjoy the last evening that she would spend with her family.
As usual, the house was a hive of activity. Fiona and Margaret were squabbling over a game they were playing.
‘She’s cheating again,’ Fiona was yelling to her mother in the kitchen, one hand firmly on her hip, her face flushed red, as behind her Margaret’s guilty smile only confirmed the situation.
Hamish walked to the cooker and kissed his wife on the back of the neck. ‘Smells good, girl, smells good.’
Her aunt Marion pushed hair from her damp forehead as she pulled fresh bread from the oven and shouted back at the girls. ‘You two are going to have to grow up now,’ she remarked sternly. ‘With Lizzie leaving us you’re are going to have to do more work around here, so you had best try to learn to get on!’
Both Fiona and Margaret tried to plead their case to their father, who just shook his head, smiling, and dropped into his favourite chair by the fire to start reading his paper.
When the whole family finally came together to eat, Lizzie’s gaze lingered around the table. All the people she loved most in the world were right here. It was such a far cry from the home she had come from. She couldn’t imagine ever going back there. As she pulled off chunks of her aunt’s home-made bread and dipped it into the warm, salty stew, she studied them all, trying to capture the scene as a picture within her mind of each one of them. Just like this, gathered talking and eating, sharing and laughing, even of her cousins as they continued to bicker with one another. A picture in her mind she could return to whenever she needed to come home in her heart. Lizzie would remember them just like this. She would miss life on her uncle and aunt’s farm, but new things, bigger things, were waiting for her in the capital. And she couldn’t wait to see what they were.
2
The next morning Lizzie awoke, as she had so many times before, to the sound of nature outside her window. A loud chevron of geese was making its way across the loch, announcing its presence in a lengthy bellow.
The familiar sound comforted her as she stretched awake, her eyes drawn to the shafts of dusky sunlight that were creeping their fingers beneath her daisy curtains.
Lizzie studied them for a moment; she’d barely paid attention to them for years, but wanted to take in every detail of what was familiar on this final morning before she left Scotland for who knew how long.
The curtains billowed a little as a draught found its way through the cracks in the stones – part and parcel of living in a cottage that had been settling for a hundred years. As the daisies rippled, Lizzie smiled at the thought of her favourite childhood flower. She remembered as if it was yesterday her aunt bent over her ancient sewing machine, pins gripped between her teeth as she’d hemmed them to match a coverlet on Lizzie’s bed. Hoping to make her niece more comfortable in her new home. First to recover and then as an enticement to stay on and finish her last two years of schooling with them. When Lizzie had written to her parents asking to stay longer, her mother and father had not protested. Even though it had been her desire, it had still deeply wounded her how they had rejected her, and she knew in her heart of hearts they were terribly ashamed of her and her secret. In the time she had lived here, her aunt and uncle had never said a bad word about her parents, but there were knowing looks and quiet whispers when she had been out of earshot that had affirmed to her that they knew the difficulties she had left behind her on Barra.
As the smell of bacon cooking wafted up her tiny staircase, her view