Outside the window, in the epic island sky, the moon was up already. Lucija remembered something Sister Brigid had told her about getting beyond human grief by accessing another reality, the transcendental. ‘Seeing the stars above,’ Brigid said. Sister Brigid swore by psilocybin. It was one of the reasons she liked their islands. This autumn she had gathered and dried magic mushrooms from the chapel’s burial ground and given some to Lucija.

Nina arranged to take a longer lunch break than usual; and drove over to Harcourt House. That same Nina, who never went out of her way to see Eva, who had survived in the islands by living in a calming bubble of ignorance of Eva’s whereabouts, who had never once during all the span of Zoe’s existence dropped by Harcourt House socially, actually just really wanted to know how Mariam was doing.

She took a bag of iced currant buns, and as she drove across the island, from one coast to another, she thought of Mariam’s baby, squidged out of her like the jam from a doughnut, and of how Mariam had held so tight to her hand in the hospital.

When she got to Harcourt House, she parked and got out of her car, and there was Mariam herself, walking back across the church field dressed top to toe in material the colour of sunflowers, or egg yolks – her face a bright moon in the yellow. Honestly, she was as glorious as the JCB that had passed too near Nina’s own small blue Peugeot this morning on the narrow road to Lerston. Didn’t she look just like a pop star in a music video, or maybe more like a saint, walking on water? Nina waved, feeling pleased. At the same moment, there appeared in the doorway of the house the dark outline of a woman, Mariam’s shadow. Nina knew she was a nun.

NINA: I was raised a Catholic. She was one of the new nuns, from Papa Astrid.

Nina and Mariam sat together on the bench under the crab-apple tree, facing the ocean. Nina handed over the buns. Mariam wasted no time. ‘The Prophet was man,’ she explained to Nina, holding the paper bag from the bakery neatly on her knees; ‘Isa was man, half the world, men. He has put love and mercy between our hearts.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Nina.

Mariam pointed up into the sky. ‘Look at moon,’ she said. Nina looked and, indeed, the moon was out already, a pale crescent hanging above the sea. ‘Moon says: we come from mother’s womb, man’s seed put baby there, God’s womb makes world.’

Mariam turned her full-moon eyes upon her. Nina put a hand out and stroked Mariam’s agitated forearm.

JUDGE: Had you come to a decision?