‘I’m a selfish person,’ I blurted out. ‘I’m acting selfishly.’

‘Yes, you are,’ agreed my mother, ‘this is a conversation about me! Me and Martha Signal. She’s invited me to be part of the “Easter Committee”, you know.’

‘But Easter’s gone,’ I said.

‘Ah,’ she replied, ‘if only it were that simple. If only it came and went, never to return.’

We peered over the well’s edge – to the gold and the bones that lay out of sight, to the mobile phone that had, in its way, been traded for some truth.

‘We can ask the well a specific question, can we?’ I said. ‘Dad never told me that.’

‘Oh, I don’t know the rules, Leah. No one does. We’re all making it up as we go along.’ She looked at me suddenly. ‘You’re not pregnant, are you?’

‘No!’ I said, startled.

She nodded slowly. Her heavy-lidded eyes – a mirror of my own – did a brief check of my face and belly for a lie.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Okay.’

She held the picture over the deep darkness below – that studio portrait of the four of us taken by a cousin of a cousin of someone who’d visited the island way back when, with their roll of marbled backdrop, their white umbrella and a lamp on a stand

‘Don’t you want to keep it for the memories?’ I’d asked her at the house when she’d selected it for her sacrifice, working the hinges of the frame to set it free.

‘Got all my memories up here,’ she’d replied, tapping the side of her head. ‘And also I have Paul’s copy somewhere in one of these boxes. He never took it with him to the mainland. Just don’t tell the well that, in case it dilutes the amount of truth we get in return.’

She let the picture slip from her fingers and the paper swayed left and right, following the path of least resistance, our faces, our smiles, falling out of focus, then disappearing.

We stayed peering over the well, as if the reward of knowledge would fly right back up in physical form, something we could grasp a hold of.

‘Why are you being like this?’ I asked my mother.

‘Like what?’

‘Different,’ I replied. Not upset is what I wanted to say but instead I said, ‘Happy.’

‘I’m taking a leaf out of your book, Leah. I’m choosing to be that way.’

She drove fists into her cardigan pockets and rested her hip against the well. I found my body echoing hers, so I adjusted my stance, slightly, to be the same but different.

‘Is that what I’m doing?’ I asked. ‘Choosing to be happy? Because right now it feels like I’m running away.’

‘Or running towards.’

I shrugged. ‘Has the well given you your answer yet?’