The last time she’d seen him was Christmas Eve, two years ago. That had been his idea. Surprisingly, her mum had agreed. And so they had all sat there, like a real family, with the windows open in her mum’s darkened kitchen in Melbourne, listening to the dull pop of fireworks. Sarah had put up fairy lights and was wearing those Tibetan-yellow leggings Sylvie had bought for her, and which she saved for certain occasions. They ate Indonesian take-away and got drunk on drinks Sylvie invented with whatever she could find in the kitchen and the half-bottle of gin her dad had brought. The mosquitoes feasted on them. Her dad gave her a big, obviously second-hand book about Caravaggio, whose paintings she had liked as a teenager. The whole thing was weird. She had no memory of her parents actually being together — her dad had left when she was four years old — but flickeringly that night, she’d almost been able to imagine it as she watched them pass an ancient vape pen back and forth across the table. It was comical and kind of pathetic. Her parents trying to remember things, but never agreeing about what they were. And then her dad had suddenly stood up to go. ‘Fucking hell, Sarah,’ he’d said, flushed. Something had been happening at a frequency that Sylvie had been oblivious to. Or maybe she was just too drunk. Her dad kissed her on the head, as if she were still a child. ‘Bye, Vee,’ he’d muttered. Then the door slammed. And sometime around midnight, Christmas morning, Sylvie had brushed her mother’s hair away from her face while Sarah vomited into the toilet.

Sylvie saw now that the approaching car was almost certainly military, and her heart thickened in her throat. The footage of police brutality couldn’t be dismissed as deep fakes anymore, not since Aarav had been caught up in a night raid. Not since he’d been stripped and beaten and made to crawl on all fours along the road.

Now the car was close enough she saw what it was: a big armoured ute, with tinted windows, and soldiers with respirator masks sitting in rows in the back. Sylvie drove slowly, both hands on the wheel, like a person in an old movie. Then she heard the command overriding her own sound system, telling her to pull over.

She did.

The ute jerked to a stop diagonally opposite.

Silence. She closed her eyes for a second. The fear ran down through her chest. Badly, she wanted to shit.

Nothing happened.