Viola and her mother had not celebrated the previous Christmas either, back on the mainland, because the incident had happened just weeks before. Cards landed on their Surrey doormat, some expressing sympathy, some offering good wishes for the season – probably. All were carried at arm’s length straight to the dustbin and deposited, unopened. The television and radio remained off, so there would be no ambush of cheer. Viola spent Christmas morning praying that her mother would not give her a present. In her grief, Viola had not thought to buy her one in return. How was Viola supposed to react to a gift anyway? There were no reserves of joy or gratefulness to call upon. No presents were exchanged. For lunch they had eaten something on toast, and then spent the rest of the day in bed, because every corner of that house held a reminder of merrier holidays past.

In many ways, a Lark Christmas was easier. On the island, there was no precedent for happiness.

Come Boxing Day, Viola took Dot to the Sisters’ Stones at their usual time, in the slim hope that the Eldest Girls would show up. They hadn’t been to the circle for over a week now and, though Viola was growing uneasy at this, she reminded herself that the run-up to the 25th, for normal families, could be filled with any number of time-consuming celebrations.

Viola had considered wandering down to the harbour to see if she might find the girls there, engaged in some activity around that decorated tree by the stocks – an impromptu bout of carolling perhaps – but she had stayed away. Festive music was a guaranteed trigger for sadness, and for this same reason, she had thought she would avoid chapel on the last Sunday of Advent. The girls had convinced her to go. This was the last time she had seen them.

‘The Christmas hymns make me cry,’ she’d confessed, ‘they remind me of Dad and of Seb. I can’t be there.’

She felt weak making this admission. Britta, Anna and Jade-Marie went every week, and to school every day, regardless; they faced down their fears while Viola and her mother had run as far as they could from their tragedy.

Still, the girls had been kind, talking her through every detail of the upcoming service, it being the same every year, and these details, in their unfamiliarity, had convinced Viola to go.

‘We couldn’t do the four-part harmonies without you,’ Anna said – a final persuasion.

Viola leant against the middle stone of the circle that Boxing Day for almost an hour. She scanned the ferns for their recent guest, worried that she would be responsible for entertaining him alone, and what ‘entertaining him’ might necessitate, but anxiety soon dissolved into boredom.