Nothing like the crime in WA, then. So why did her mind insist on conflating the two, and so vividly she couldn’t sleep? Why her inability to push away the image of the girls in My Little Pony t-shirts in the picture on Mum’s mantelpiece—eight-year-old Nic taller, fatter, smilier; serious, skinny, six-year-old Michelle tucked under her arm—in bed in the farmhouse from the paper, their dad coming through the door with his gun, shooting one in her sleep and then, when the other woke at the noise, shooting her as she screamed and screamed. Why couldn’t she stop obsessing over which one he killed first, which one had to see her sister’s body? I hope Mum was first, Lena’s brain kicked, because Aunty Nic was older, could’ve handled it better. But, then, Aunty Nic would’ve understood more, so maybe it was better that she went in her sleep, Mum still so young she might not have had time to comprehend the size of the betrayal, the irrevocability of the horror.

This didn’t happen, she’d told herself, leaning out of bed and grabbing her phone and opening a news site to see the picture again. See, idiot? Those faces belong to strangers. The thing in your head never happened. Not to them.

Was that why Nic kept all these papers? Lena wondered now, rubbing her hands together to dislodge the grime. So she could refute the midnight horrors by returning to the documentary record, reassuring herself that though terrible things have happened—keep happening, will always be happening—they are not happening to her?

But how would that work, like, actually? The three or four papers on the top of each stack might be accessible, at least until the tower got above head height. When Lena and the cop had cleared them all for the ambulance they’d had to push the top stacks off the towers, leaping out of the way to avoid being hit as they came tumbling down. It hadn’t occurred to her in the nightmare moment to wonder how those stacks, each one made up of maybe fifty papers bound with string, had got so high in the first place. Lena hadn’t noticed a stepladder anywhere, but that didn’t mean anything. There could be a whole fucking industrial lift in here and she wouldn’t have seen it.