Elise wiped a tear and shook her head.

“We’ll get her back into treatment,” she said. “She’s sick. Very sick.”

Elise hitched her handbag on her shoulder, fiddled with the strap, little gestures to tell me she was about to go. That this was the time to say what a man in my position should say, perhaps what we both knew—that the press conference and the denials weren’t going to help. That the damage had been done. Ten years from now, people would still know me from Claire’s abduction. I was never going to shake that accusation. But if they ever had any doubt about me, if they ever wondered if I was just an innocent man living through everyone’s worst nightmare, they would half remember some other accusation that might have been covered up or suppressed before it ever met the light of day in full.

Maybe I’d never been going to live a normal life again after Claire. But what Melanie had done had made absolutely sure of it.

“You must hate us,” Elise said eventually. I thought about it. I guess I deserved to. But Elise Springfield, the little girl all grown up, looked as tired as I felt just then, standing in the hallway of the police headquarters, her eyes puffy from tears. In the end, I told her that she was wrong. I didn’t hate her, or her family. Maybe it helped her, or me. Before she left, she gave my hand a brief squeeze.

At first, there was only light. Then colors came, red and green, smashing into each other in explosive starbursts against the backs of her eyelids. Pretty. She was being dragged by the wrists. Amanda had only been knocked out by a punch once before in her life. She’d copped a stray fist trying to break up a fight in the visitors’ center of Brisbane Women’s Correctional, mainly because the guy going to town on his ex-wife had totally disregarded that the woman was holding a baby against her chest. Amanda didn’t usually mind the odd prison fight. She found their spontaneous appearance in her otherwise ordinary day as refreshing as finding a surprise ten-dollar note on the pavement. But not that time. The big lughead in the visitors’ center had fractured her cheekbone.

Nothing felt fractured now, as far as she could tell, except her conception of time. Just when she thought she was coming to, it seemed she slept a little more, on her chest on the dust-coated floor, long enough for her hand, trapped under her hip, to become numb. In time, voices came to her. She lay still and listened.

“… any more of your pussy-arse shit. We need to get this done. Go into the other room, if you have to. I’ll just pop her.”

“It’s over. Come on, Jay. Come on. We need to cut our losses and go. We can’t make this any—”

“I’ll just pop her, mate. Bran, move. Move.”