In the light of the surgery room I got a better look at the doctor. Honey-colored hair falling from a hastily applied clip. Her small face was crowded with big, sumptuous features. I was prickling with emotions, relief and terror as she opened the box and peered inside.

“Oh hello, birdy,” she murmured, almost to herself. Then to me: “I’ll be thirty seconds.” She jogged into a back room. I couldn’t look into the box, did a restless lap of the surgery room instead. The certificate on the wall read Dr. Elaine Bass.

Dr. Bass came back in a minute dressed in a T-shirt and denim shorts, pulling on white latex gloves.

“I didn’t catch your name,” she said.

“It’s Ted. Collins.” One truth, one lie.

“Laney.” She smiled, reaching slowly into the box. “And this is?”

“Oh.” I felt heat come into my face. “Peeper. She’s a year old.”

“How long has she been unwell?”

“I don’t know.” The dread was returning. I watched as Laney lifted Peeper onto the examination table. “She didn’t go into the coop with the others at sunset. I found her under a couch.”

Laney took the big bird’s wing in her hand and pulled it gently away from the feathery body, stretching the beautiful arc, fanning shades of gray, black, cream. She felt around the base of the bird’s neck and smoothed back the feathers on her head.

“All right, Ted. I’m going to ask you to leave her with me.”

“Can I please stay?” I cleared my throat. “Just, you know. Until we know something.”

“Of course.” Laney gestured to the door through which we’d come. “Stay as long as you like.”

I heard her talking to my bird, calling her by her name, through the door to the waiting area. I read every brochure in the room, coming to the conclusion that there were far too many types of parasites in the world. When Laney fell silent, I sat on the couch and surrendered to my crushing worry.

The truth was, without my birds I might not have been able to recover from what had happened. On the side of the highway one fateful day, I’d pulled over to fix a noise in my car, not realizing that I’d parked only meters from a young girl waiting for a bus. She’d been abducted and brutally assaulted only minutes after I left her side. I was accused of the crime, charged, put on trial, and then the charges were dropped, the judiciary leaving me to be sentenced by the public when they couldn’t find the evidence to do it themselves.

I’d been an ordinary man. A drug squad cop. A husband. A father. Now I was Australia’s most hated man.