“So you never kissed?”

“No.” I put my head in my hands. “I tried. I put an arm around her a few times, for photos and things. But I was a really awkward teenager. Tall and goofy, you know?”

A flicker of a smile from Frankie. Maybe she wanted to say she had known me to be like that. I’d been the biggest person on the drug squad and she the smallest. We made fun of each other for it. But Frankie’s smile was a flash if there at all. The words on the paper before us were stark, like a death warrant, almost painful under my fingertips.

“So it wasn’t until you were at university that you became sexually active?”

“Yes.”

“And who was that with?”

“Oh, just a girl.” I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. “I don’t want to bring her into this unless it’s absolutely necessary. It was just a girl from one of my classes. I took criminology and criminal justice, thinking I’d be a cop or a lawyer. I didn’t make the grades for lawyer. Too much drinking, partying. It was really the drinking at uni that broke me out of childhood. It gave me the confidence to talk to girls for the first time.”

“Did you date anyone between Mel and the girl at uni?”

“No. It wasn’t even as though Mel and I were dating,” I said. “We just said we were going steady, and we held hands when we were at school. I sent her love letters and she wrote me poems. That was it.”

“You and Melanie—were you sexual at all? Even if not, all the way into intercourse?”

“No,” I said. “Not at all. And if I couldn’t get up the guts to even kiss her, I don’t know how she thinks I was going after her little sister.”

“So you’re saying she’s completely making it up? Fabricating the entire claim?” Frankie said.

“Yes. And she’s doing a bloody good job of it,” I said. I read over the words before me. There was sweat beading at my temples. “I mean it’s … It’s very convincing.”

“For a pack of lies,” Sean murmured.

“It’s like she’s taken the story from somewhere. Like she’s mistaking me for someone else.”

“How so?” Frankie asked.

“When she talks here about this Truth or Dare business. Yes, kids my age played Truth or Dare and Spin the Bottle, but we never played it. Melanie and I.”

“It’s a very specific detail,” Frankie mused. “She’s actually naming a game that would initiate sexual experimentation, even bargaining that might lead easily to sexual abuse.”

I nodded.

“She’s not just saying you led her into sex,” she added. “She’s telling us how you did it.”

“Well, I didn’t do it,” I said. “I don’t know who did, but it wasn’t me.”

Frankie seemed to catch herself musing, wandering out of her role as interrogator and over to the territory of being my colleague again. She straightened.