A ridged cup is being fed into his hand. He acquiesces like a trauma victim.

Milk? Sugar?

Little cartons, packets, a stirrer dropped into his other hand.

That’ll be a fiver, Guv.

Logan, imagining the man was committing a random act of kindness, is taken aback at the request for money. Ashamed of his naivety, he digs into a front pocket, lifting his buttocks for better access. The man waits with his hand out, smiling until he is paid. The loss is swallowed and the window sighs back to its shut position, deadening the air. Logan watches the bandit tramp back to his van. He is looking to detect a dance step, a heel click.

The coffee tastes foul. Or maybe there’s just a bad taste in his mouth, thinks Logan. The foul cake of deceit topped with the sickly icing of evangelism. What has she done, this Salmon woman?

Though he was hoping to save April from prison by proving her mad, he fears his efforts to break her silence have now made matters worse. Her cheerfulness, her lack of contrition, will not play well with a jury. A lifetime’s incarceration is hovering over her ecstatic head. His tooth twinges again.

And there is something even more disturbing about all this. When they lock her up – which they surely will – they will not be locking up the same person who committed the crime. The young woman he first met was a chrysalis: silent, defended, and a mess inside. But something has cracked and a whole other creature has emerged. The jury will say, ‘This is she who committed a crime’, and they will be wrong.

How he knows, he cannot tell. He has no proof, and he cannot trust himself. His sense of certainty is falling away. He knows less than he knew this morning, and even less than he knew a week ago. Indeed, when he tries to untangle his thoughts, they become less like strings and more like mush, melting into each other, formless and endless. This is the secret he must hide from the rest of the world. He has had to pull over because he, like April before her hatching, is now a mess inside. Whether he will crack and emerge as some certain (but perhaps certifiable) creation he doesn’t know. He might just as easily fail to progress, the essence of him rotting quietly away until he is just a casing, grown dry and hollow, swinging from a windowsill by a thread.