Grace leaned forward so I could see her face in the gap between the seats.

‘She’s not my mum. She’s my sister.’

Grace knew this. ‘Oh yeah,’ she said. ‘That’s right. Well, she’s pretty, anyway.’

‘I guess.’

‘You don’t think so?’

‘I don’t think about it.’

‘He thinks she’s pretty,’ Grace said.

I said nothing. Grace waited a minute before she spoke again.

‘I mean, it makes sense. Now Camilla’s gone…’

‘What?’

‘I’m just saying – he has a type. That’s all.’

‘She doesn’t even look like Camilla.’

‘Sure,’ said Grace. ‘Whatever you say.’

We fell into silence then, a silence in which I replayed every interaction I’d ever seen between Aleks and Lou.

I remembered one evening when I was late getting out of training. I had drilled my set of five dives over and over, thirty times or more. My wrists were throbbing.

Lou had parked in a disabled space, and Aleks’s modest sedan was in the space next to her. Lou had kept the engine running. Lou always kept the engine running.

She had the window rolled down despite the chill. She was eating from a bucket of KFC, using her teeth to tear the crusted skin. There was a pile of bones between her car and his. She must have been waiting a while.

I threw my bag in the footwell and got in the car.

‘Want some chicken?’

She held out the piece she was eating. Half of it was gone. The darker flesh and strings of sinew were visible, the grey-purple bone exposed.

‘No.’

‘Suit yourself,’ Lou said, taking another bite.

When she’d picked the leg clean, she licked her fingers and thumbs and made a little humph noise of satisfaction. She wiped her hands on the refresher towelette and used it to swipe the last of her lipstick off before throwing the bucket and towelette out the car window.

‘Lou!’

‘What?’

‘Forget it.’

‘Do I smell like chicken? Smell my hair.’

She bent her head. I leaned over and sniffed. She did smell like chicken, a rich, fatty, savoury smell. Beneath that, there were the usual Lou smells: cigarette smoke, dry cleaning, the powdery perfume she wore which gave me a headache.

‘Well?’

‘You’re fine.’

There was movement in front of the car. Aleks was leaving for the night, his gym bag slung across his body.

He approached his car, saw the scattered chicken bones, then gave Lou a curt nod.

Lou nodded in return, holding eye contact.

‘Keep walking, pretty boy,’ she said under her breath.

I’d taken her tone as wary, circumspect. I thought she was being protective of me, that she sensed in Aleks the same tendencies she saw in her clients.