The Billet House lay beyond the stables and the dog kennels. I took the brick path through the estate, torch in one hand, the phone in the other. Every so often I would accidentally nudge the home button, casting a ghostly blue light across the scene as I made Ben’s lock screen blink into life. It was a photo of him sandwiched between his mother and sister, all three of them open-mouthed, laughing.

Doubt crept up on me slowly as I headed north. Are you sure he wants to see you like that? Doubt slipped its arm across my shoulders and leant in to ask the burning question: Are you sure you can trust him with those photos?

I’d read articles from the mainland, accompanied by studio shots of frowning women, stories of how naked pictures taken on phones, intended for just one pair of eyes, had spread like a virus. Would my pictures find their way into that fabled stash of dirty magazines and videotapes that were rumoured to pass from man to man on the island? Would Saul Cooper get his hands on them, giving him even more of a hold over me?

I stopped on the path and typed in Ben’s passcode, unlocking the phone. I searched the bright squares for the one that would allow me to look at my pictures again, to reassess. A tessellation of me swooped onto the screen, thumbnails of my face, my body – all those different versions of Leah.

Then above me, more naked images. Not of me.

Dread flared hot in my throat, my limbs slackened. Mainland girls, from before, I thought. Then, desperately, Please let them be mainland girls, please let them be mainland girls…

But also I could hear Ben telling me how he really needed to keep his job. I could see three faces scowling at me across the school canteen, and a phone being slid onto the dusty top of a bookcase in the Billet House. Just out of reach, beneath a bed, lay a pair of bloodied horns.

I clicked on the images, blurry, gritty, some obscured by a finger or a smudge of green, the flash blanching their bare skin as they shielded themselves – not posing, not pouting. Then the frame was trained on one girl alone, progressing closer and closer to the lens with each swipe of my thumb, a white nightdress being brought up to cover her body, higher, higher, her breasts now obscured.

Viola.

Viola and the Eldest Girls.

I asked for nothing in return when I dropped that phone into the depths of the well. The deal was that you surrendered something you held dear in return for knowledge, and I had not fulfilled my side of the bargain. A phone was worthless on Lark with no signal to serve it. The conversation I’d recorded was of no interest to anyone. The versions of me it held were stupid and gullible.