‘I think you owe me this,’ I said quietly, in all reasonableness.

She folded her arms. ‘How’s that?’

‘Sparing your Britta punishment for those pagan tattoos.’

We locked eyes.

‘That’s not what she said,’ said the woman.

I floundered. ‘Huh?’

I had let the girls’ actions go, not followed them up. I was too engrossed in my own error of judgement, my own heartache. Mr Crane would have seen what they’d done, those scars scabbing at their wrists. Perhaps he meted out a penalty later.

‘So, they were punished?’

It wasn’t enough of a question to prompt Rhoda to respond.

‘What did Britta say?’ I stumbled on.

Rhoda shook her head, disapproving of my fragile grasp of the situation, but she slid the bottle of wine across the counter towards me.

‘Take it,’ she said, claiming victory in this surrender. Then she turned away, sighing as she wrote my purchase in her ledger.

I didn’t want it anymore, the wine, my thirty pieces of silver. I could see what I was doing – challenging the mother in lieu of the daughter, a girl who had been through enough already, manipulated and led astray by our charming newcomer, just as I had.

Sister Agnes’ account of Ben’s graveyard lessons had spread; we all knew where the idea for the tattoos had come from. We all knew that he was the only person on the island with stashes of India ink. I should have been comforting Rhoda in the Provisions Store that evening, assuring her that no one was acting friendly with Mr Hailey in the staff room anymore. I should have apologised for the polite smiles that we hid behind, the way we awkwardly circled questions, not daring to ask. Why was Benjamin Hailey still teaching? Why did Mr Crane still pat him on the back when they passed each other in the corridor?

Instead, I left the store with a muttered thank-you, a gutless one.

I passed the estate’s stone well on the walk uphill to my parents’ place, a familiar structure, but that evening it delivered me a lost memory. Not one I’d forgotten as such, rather a memory I had set aside – an object placed on a high shelf to be brought down when its usefulness was realised.