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‘The age you are in that picture, that’s the age I appeared to be when I first changed.

I was just a cub. My mother talked into my mind and we changed together.

She showed me how to walk and talk as a human, how to cover my body, how to sing with words.

’ Sky paused. ‘The pack wasn’t happy. Mother was restless always.

She would disappear sometimes, leaving us behind.

She only had two cubs who could change. One day, men came near. ’

‘Who?’

‘I don’t know. They stayed for a while in tents and they lived in the forest, trapping and digging and destroying.

The pack kept away except for my mother.

She crept towards them. She changed more and more often, left me and my brother more and more.

One day she did not come back, and when we tried to track her, she could not be found.

The last trace of her was at the camp but the men had gone. ’

‘Oh Sky.’

‘After that, my father found a new mate from another pack, and my brother broke away from our pack so he could track down the men and find our mother. He never came back either.’

‘And that was when you knew she’d died?’

‘Oh no, that was much much later, many moons later. I was full-grown and it was just before Simon came. I still missed her every day. Every time I changed, I sang for her. If I saw people in the forest, I listened out for her, and when I was a wolf I smelled the air for her. But she didn’t come back. ’

‘I’m sorry.’

Sky made an impatient movement. ‘When Simon came and the people put up the tents, I thought that maybe they were the same people she had gone away with and that maybe she was human all the time and had lost her scent. So I went to the camp and looked out for her. But the people were different. They did different things. They laughed and sang and they did not hurt the forest.’

‘No. They just wanted to observe it, not steal from it.’

‘Yes. It seemed that way,’ said Sky. ‘All the same, I wondered if my mother were with them. None of the women looked like her, but I didn’t know how she would look if she had been human all that time.

I watched as a wolf and then, so that I could understand, I watched as a human.

And then I saw Simon. And he was beautiful.

When I am a wolf, he is just a man, but when I am a human…

it is as if he’s the only man. Do you understand? ’

‘Yes.’

‘I liked to sit with them and talk and listen. Then one night, before I had changed back into a wolf, I heard a song on the wind. A song without words. My grandmother was waiting under the trees in human form, her hair grey, her face lined. Her song was sad and she said to me “can you feel your mother in your heart?” And I looked in my heart and she was gone. And I knew that wherever she was, she was dead. And I embraced my grandmother and then we changed back and we went back to the pack. And the pack knew and howled for my dead mother.’

She sighed and reached forward to stroke Simon’s shoulder. He was sleeping again and had turned to curl up with his tail wrapped round his nose. Rose reached forward and pulled Sky into her arms.

‘The world loses something of its light when your mother dies, doesn’t it?’ said Sky. ‘And when your brother is gone, there is no one who remembers properly.’

‘I’m sorry you lost your brother too,’ said Rose.

‘It’s strange isn’t it? Your brother is like yourself, only annoying.’

Rose smiled. ‘I’d never thought of it like that before.’

‘You belong to each other,’ said Sky, ‘and when something divides you; it is like a severed limb which can never grow back. My brother is lost as you say. But now I have you for my sister and I’m glad.’

Rose was about to respond when the doorbell rang.

Sky tensed, then relaxed, frowning towards the corridor. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘It’s not that woman.’

It was Andrew. Rose introduced him to Sky, who frowning, nevertheless allowed him to check on Simon and ask her questions.

Her look was watchful and she was on guard, but when he suggested Rose left them so they could talk, she shrugged and smiled a little.

Rose returned to the sitting room and started the film again. There was David’s voice, there was his hand, the back of his head. In every shot, she was looking for him, fast forwarding when he was not there.

‘Wait!’ said Sky suddenly from the doorway. ‘Who’s that?’

Rose froze the image. It was the part of the film with the pack in the sunlit glade, with the creature prowling and limping in the background, the wolves wary and disturbed .

‘He’s gone. He was there.’

Rose rewound a little way, until they could see the stranger under the trees, his face in shadow.

‘That’s the one who caused all the trouble,’ said Sky.

‘He is the one to beware of. But Rose,’ she put her hand on Rose’s arm as if to pull her away.

‘You shouldn’t watch any more. It hurts you to stare into the past again and again.

Something will not come back because we yearn for it.

Looking back will make you waste away, when you need strength to free yourself and move onward. ’

She shivered and went to get more stew.

Rose pressed fast forward, then play again and heard David’s voice. ‘I’m proud of that!’

Turning off the TV, she took a breath and went to get ready. She had a ceilidh to prepare for. She was going to make David proud.