John has dinner with Innes MacInnes while Innes’s family is away. Cautious of being seen, John checks every room to ensure they are alone. During a tense meal, Innes tries to initiate physical contact, which John avoids. Innes attempts to create a romantic mood by playing a Nana Mouskouri record and asking John to dance. John complies but remains rigid and hyper-vigilant, scanning the room for any potential exposure.

A flashback reveals their long, secret history, involving clandestine meetings in the hills, John’s emotional coldness, and the day Grace discovered them together. Following the discovery, Grace agreed to stay on the conditions that John turn to God and stay away from Innes. During their forced separation, Innes corresponded with a Polish man named Sascha, invited him to Scotland, and sent him money for the journey; Sascha never arrived, and Innes wept publicly before John intervened. John eventually told Grace he could not stay away from Innes, and Grace had no choice but to leave. She later took up with John’s brother, Uilleam, who took care of her when no one else would.

Back in the present, Innes coaxes John to stay by asking for his “help” () upstairs, a long-standing pretext for intimacy. After turning on every light and appliance in the house until there is not a single shadow, Innes goes upstairs. Following a moment of internal conflict, John sheds his coat and follows. At the top of the stairs, the two men embrace in the dark.

By November, the cold forces John and Cal to use a gas heater in the weaving shed. The dry heat causes their skin to chap and crack. One evening, John tends to Cal’s painful hands with ointment. Resentful over the plan to transfer the croft, Cal provokes his grandmother, Ella, until John warns him to stop. Cal then treats John’s hands, which are severely damaged from years of working with wool.

Speaking in Gaelic to exclude Ella, Cal urges his father to sign up for unemployment benefits, but John refuses, calling it dishonest. Cal secretly struggles with whether to tell John about the tenancy, fearing it will force him to choose a side and trap him on the island. He puts rubber gloves on his father’s hands to help them heal.

The winter is harsh and isolating. Cal’s Christmas visit with his mother is strained by their unresolved argument. One day, Ella confronts Cal about his coldness, but he again avoids the topic. Later, Cal walks alone to an abandoned van on the shore. He is joined by Innes, who also uses the van as a refuge; while there, Cal recalls that he and Doll used the van for secret, emotionally unfulfilling sexual experimentation. They drink together, and Innes admits he feels stuck in his life and wonders if it is too late for him to pursue an education.

John and Cal drive to Stornoway, sharing a bonding moment while speeding along the mountain road. After dropping Cal off, John visits a Tolsta crofter, Anndra, and they follow a familiar routine that leads toward intimacy, leaving John consumed with guilt afterward. He then goes to a support office, where he confesses his life’s secret to a counsellor named D.I. John reveals his lifelong love for his neighbor, Innes, admitting he only married his wife, Grace, to be near Innes. He explains Grace knew and left, a “kindness” he has had to conceal by playing the jilted husband. He also discloses that he sometimes thinks about unscrewing the hose on their gas heater and taking his own life. 

Later, John and Cal deliver tweed to the mill, where they share a lighthearted moment. On the drive home, they pass a primary school, and John instinctively cranes to search the strangers’ faces; when Cal notices, John admits his fear of encountering Grace. The chapter ends with a flashback to Cal’s childhood, revealing how Grace abandoned him at a bus stop by tricking him into running home for a book she never intended to wait for, creating the opportunity for her to leave the family home forever.

On Communion Sunday, a hungover Doll is chastised by his mother, Sarah, for his drinking and for embarrassing the family. Forced to wash outside, he later sneaks a drink from a gin bottle hidden in the ruins of his grandfather’s house. As she walks to church, Sarah opens the fuel cap of Doll’s prized car and sprinkles the salty detritus she has swept from the tablecloth into the petrol tank; her sabotage is why Doll can never get the car to work and, therefore, can never leave. At the service, Doll is publicly humiliated when Reverend Rose and the visiting elders single him out for a reprimand in front of the entire congregation. That night, a furious Cal argues with his father, John, that the shaming will only worsen Doll’s drinking. John reveals the situation is dire: Flash found Doll lying in a ditch while driving home, and Doll’s parents are planning to make him live in the byre. Horrified, Cal begs his father to intervene.

While working with the sheep, Innes invites John on a trip to the mainland, suggesting they use buying a van as a cover story to spend time together openly. John is hesitant. Their day is interrupted by a nurse, Anna-Marie, who is aggressively pursuing Innes’s brother, Sorley. Her arrival fuels Innes’s fear that Sorley will marry and displace him from their family home. Desperate, Innes proposes that he and John move in together, arguing they could pass as two old friends helping each other out. John raises objections about the church and community rather than refusing outright, but he then turns down Innes’s earlier, smaller invitations. This is the last straw for Innes, who declares their decades-long, one-sided relationship is over. He tells John he is tired of waiting and deserves a love worth the risk. Just after their argument, Cal, oblivious to the tension, offers to help Innes with the transistor John had just refused to look at.