Watching star belts wheel across an impossibly clear sky, Nash remembered their last moments together, and the aftermath. Like a worn tape, the sequence of events had been replayed in his mind so many times that he could dredge up every scene, dissect its beats, evaluate its import.

Hindsight. If only he’d listened. If only he’d read the signs.

He found himself fast-forwarding to the funeral. It had been a suitably bleak day. Riven with pain, he’d agreed Natalie should be buried in her home town of Melbourne. Natalie’s father, Brendan, had tried to be gracious and managed it for the most part. At the wake, Nash had found himself drunkenly apologising and tried to give him back the wedding money they’d used to help fund the renovations on the house, but they were both broken men whose gestures of goodwill could offer no consolation to each other. Natalie’s architect brother, Jonathan, on the other hand, had refused to even look at him.

Some months later, he had turned up unannounced in Margaret River. Letting him in, Nash felt ashamed. The beautiful house Jonathan had designed was a mess – bottles, dishes, rubbish piling up in the bins.

‘Doing it tough, are you?’ Jonathan said, looking around.

In the months since Natalie’s accident, Nash had lost weight and the stress lines on his forehead had deepened into angry cracks.

‘I don’t want sympathy. I don’t deserve it.’

‘No, you don’t,’ Jonathan told him evenly. ‘That’s why I’m here. We’re going to bring a civil suit against you for negligence, hopefully manslaughter.’

Nash stared at him for several seconds. ‘Brendan? I thought . . .’

Jonathan shook his head. ‘It’s nothing to do with Dad. Bec and I have decided it’s the right thing to do.’

Jonathan’s wife was a crown prosecutor, a hyper-efficient legal bloodhound whom even Natalie had struggled to like. Nash found himself laughing shrilly.

‘You want the house, Jonathan? Mate, take it – take everything!’

Jonathan leaned forward, his dark eyes radiating malice. ‘I don’t want the house. I want you. I want everyone to know what a fucked-up piece of selfish shit you are. I want your name to become synonymous with cowardice and incompetence. The Rob Nash brand is going to turn sponsors off so fast, you’ll forget you ever had a phone number!’

There had been no suit because there didn’t need to be. With Jonathan and Bec’s assistance, The World Tonight had produced a one-hour special entitled ‘Maverick of the Deep’. Every rival Nash had ever had was trotted out to cast aspersions, every error he had ever made was ruthlessly dissected. They made his career look like a sequence of lucky breaks and double-crosses. The breathless voice-over and sinister soundtrack even had him believing it.