Now that I think of it, it isn’t quite right to say that Lou and I hadn’t been speaking since Julie Korsak’s visit to our house. That night, and several other nights that followed, I climbed into Lou’s bed with its filthy, expensive sheets.

She was curled up on her side. She didn’t even open her eyes. She reached out blindly behind her, touching my face, patting my hair.

‘Nightmare?’ she said.

‘Nightmare,’ I said.

While I was recovering, I often thought of Sergei Chalibashvili. But I thought about Greg Louganis too. Half an hour after Chalibashvili’s accident, Louganis jumped into that pool, still tinged brown from Chalibashvili’s blood.

He said he’d had a premonition when his rival climbed to the platform. He’d just known something would go wrong.

Louganis completed the 307C anyway. He went on to win an Olympic medal with that dive.

Lou drove me to my first training session back. She kept humming and put her foot down hard on the accelerator. The car purred and shot ahead.

‘I love this car,’ she said.

I remembered the day she’d bought it. She picked me up from school with the windows down and music blaring. I looked at the low, black, sleek coupé and said, ‘What if you need to fit more than two people?’

Lou looked at me like I was crazy.

‘Who else would I need to fit?’ she said.

My first dive from the ten-metre platform was a simple forward dive, pike position, no somersaults, no twists. I felt weaker, sluggish. I didn’t get nearly enough lift. The angle was all wrong. It would take time to get back to the way I had been. And with Aleks gone, I doubted I’d be able to maintain my previous level of motivation.

Still, I put my hands the right way. Flat palms, straight arms pressing into my ears, one hand over the other. I kept my eyes open. Here was the water; I smashed through and vanished under it. There was the familiar cold, the familiar sting of impact.

As I was sinking, the thought occurred to me: the water didn’t care. It didn’t care if I was facing up to something. If I was making up for something. It didn’t care about the mistakes I’d made or the crimes I’d committed. The water would do what it had always done: break my fall, and drag me back to the surface.

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