Tonight, Nic and Will are in the kitchen chopping vegies when Lena calls out from the living room. She’s staying at a friend’s place in the city for the summer, but she visits a few times a week to eat dinner and check that order is being maintained. She comes and goes like she owns the place, Will says, and Nic reminds him that it’s Lena’s house as much as his whether she’s living there or not.

‘You two, quick, come look,’ Lena calls, and so they wipe their hands and walk through the unnecessarily, gapingly huge doorway into the spikily bare living room.

Lena is at the window, which is wide open to the street. Nic doesn’t like the way she exposes the place so casually. You’d think after everything that had happened she’d be more careful about being on display.

This thought followed immediately by another: Why shouldn’t she show herself to the world? Lucky world!

Nic and Will have worked hard, recently, to convince Lena of this. That she is not the one who should feel shame and hide away. That she has every right to stride through life with the sun on her face. It took a bit of arguing, but eventually she agreed to let Nic approach the college boy’s parents and tell them what the turd had done, get them to pay for a content removal service. Will was sceptical about the removal thing, reckoned it was impossible to find every trace of anything, but if it helped even a bit while also meaning the dickhead’s parents would know what he did and that it would cost them a shitload, then that was win-win-win in his book.

An unexpected benefit of that stoush: the pornographer’s parents made him withdraw from uni and stay on the farm to learn the family business in a more hands-on, constantly supervised manner. It was the boost Lena needed to reconsider quitting. That battle was ongoing. Nic and Will had to admit cluelessness when it came to battling university administrations. Pushing computers off desks or pretending to be medical professionals wouldn’t cut it, unfortunately. But Michelle and her husband were coming down to have Christmas in the Family Home (and now there weren’t enough chairs for them all and she’d have to get more! See!!!) and staying in Sydney long enough to storm the admissions office when it reopened. Lena had worked so hard for her place at that university. Nic knew that her irritating, overly confident, bossy-boots little sister would work just as hard to make sure she could keep it.

‘Come on,’ Lena calls again. ‘Look!’