This time, he took a couple of steps closer to me, kicking aside the chair I’d been sitting on. I scrambled to my feet, looking around for something I could use as a weapon, something I could fight back with. But how could I beat a shotgun?

‘How I get to someone like you is I use your pressure points,’ Mills said, and stopped adjacent to the sofa, eight feet from me, his voice unsettlingly even, as calm as a lake without wind. It was as if nothing had interrupted him, as if he’d never attacked me with the shotgun and split my face. ‘We’ve all got pressure points. When you do all these heroic things for families, when you get confident, when you follow people around and they never see you watching’ – he flashed me a look and it was obvious why: he knew it was me who’d talked to his girlfriend at the petrol station – ‘you start to think you’re absolutely invincible. But you’re not. You’re still vulnerable. You’ve got a daughter, right?’

A butterfly escaped in my chest.

‘Stay away from her,’ I said, my voice groggy.

He nodded, but not because he was agreeing to; it looked like he’d been expecting the exact response that I’d given him. His face had changed again and I realized I was even further away from understanding him than when he’d first walked in here. He looked at me like he felt some semblance of compassion – but he’d attacked me with the end of a gun, opened up a cut under my eye, talked about murdering me.

‘Your daughter is a pressure point,’ he said, ‘we both know that. But what would I achieve by kidnapping her, or threatening her, or killing her? It would crush you. It would rip your whole life apart, all over again.’ He stared at me, letting me know that he’d read up about my history and knew all about Derryn. I’d got to my feet already, forcing myself to face him down. ‘But, if I hurt Annabel,’ he went on, using her name now, his voice exactly the same pitch, tone, volume, ‘you’d get really fucking angry, and that determination I talked about earlier, that ability and willingness you have to play dirty, that would probably come back to haunt me. Maybe you’d end up in a shallow grave somewhere because you’d be so messed up with grief and rage and revenge that you’d be sloppy and easy to handle. Or maybe your rage would be the fuel that keeps you sharp, the fuel that means you come for me and kill me, you come for everyone I work with; and this thing we don’t want you to unravel gets unravelled, and getting rid of your daughter turns out to be the worst decision in human history.’