‘It sounds like some bullshit out of Star Trek,’ he said, ‘but this physicist, he works at one of the big universities in America, and it’s an actual thing. It’s real. A lot of the most incredible human beings on the planet say it’s real. It’s to do with string theory, particles, the substance of the universe, the infinity of space – something, I don’t know. But like you say, parallel worlds. Basically, what this guy is saying is that in each possible outcome, in each universe, there’s a copy of you that thinks their reality is the correct reality. Which means, somewhere out there, you and me are sitting in a room just like this one, but with sandwich wrappers all over the floor.’ His eyes moved to the remnants of our burgers, to the wall full of paper, to me, and then to the photos of the family he’d once called his own. He lifted the shot of Leanne away from the table. ‘And somewhere out there, there’s a version of me that still has this.’

It was difficult to know what to say to that. I’d been down this road myself, when I’d mourned Derryn, when I’d landed the case at Christmas that had brought all those memories back to the surface, and it was so hard to push past grief when it was this intense; it may have been harder for Healy than anyone I’d ever met because he’d left so much unsaid. I, at least, got to say goodbye to the person I loved. He hadn’t. His daughter had been murdered, his sons had disowned him, and – ground down by years of Healy maniacally working cases, of putting his job ahead of everything else, of hurting her emotionally and once, to his shame, physically – his wife finally left in the aftermath of an investigation that snapped him into pieces: an obsessive search for the murderer of a mother and her twin girls.