She’d not talked to anyone about it before – not even her friends back home, the ones brave enough to come to the house. Maybe it was because they seemed a little too curious, in love with the idea of such horror. Viola didn’t believe that the Eldest Girls were more likely to understand, not at all. She knew they wouldn’t even try to, and this, in itself, was the relief.

‘My mum took me out of school because she started to believe that it was dangerous for me to be anywhere but home and then she decided that where we lived was dangerous too, so we came here, halfway across the Atlantic, because the radio said that Lark was very safe.’

The girls had just listened, observed. They didn’t take her awful story and mould it into something recognisable, familiar enough for them to sympathise. Instead they pulled her into an embrace, a small and wonderful enclosed world built by the warmth of their bodies, and it was only when Viola was encircled like this, that the feeling struck – that she had spoken too much and not listened enough in return. She asked them, ‘What bad things have happened to you?’

They reported it with peculiar detachment, which made their confessions all the more shocking. It was as if they were reciting memorised phrases; they used their school assembly voices.

‘So,’ said Britta, ‘with your mainland view of things –’

‘As a girl,’ Jade-Marie cut in.

‘– does that sound right to you?’

Viola could barely speak. ‘It sounds… impossible,’ she managed.

‘Are you doubting us?’ said Anna. ‘Are you saying we’re lying?’

‘No!’ said Viola. ‘No! I’m saying it’s impossible that this has been allowed to go on.’

For that reason alone, Viola knew that she would have to be the one to do it, to make payment for the heart.

She was stunned that evening in December when they had been caught unawares in the glare of the flash, their naked bodies captured, digitised, stored. She was appalled, of course she was, but at the same time she knew it meant less to her. To the Eldest Girls it was yet another violation, a scar upon a scar. To Viola it was a fresh attack, a new battle, and she had the confidence of the beginner.

‘You like what you see, do you?’ she’d called out to their trespasser, goading him.

He did not reply. He kept the phone held up, reframing and refocusing, so Viola had walked towards him, swiping a white nightdress from the ground to cover herself as she went.

Jade-Marie begged her to come back.