‘My brother is a very loving person,’ Marina had declared. ‘Johnny can lose his temper sometimes but it’s only ever verbal, never physical. My brother is a gentleman with women. He’s always fallen for his girlfriends with—I guess you’d say with blind devotion. Oh, but it’s not like I’m saying Kendra wasn’t a lovely girl. She was really sweet. I adored her.’

Marina presented herself as the person Kendra confided in about her anxieties and, eventually, her suicidal thoughts. Marina spoke, with a lyrical sadness, about how fragile Kendra had become.

‘If my brother is guilty of anything, he’s guilty of believing his love could save Kendra. He loved her too much to face how mentally unwell she was, until it was too late,’ Marina said directly to the jury, dabbing a few tears from the edges of her eye make-up.

‘Do you reckon Marina knows he killed her?’ Paula asked.

‘I think about that all the time when I watch her up there on the stand,’ Anita replied. ‘She must realise. But she loves her brother. And there’s a great big concrete slab of loyalty there.’

‘People can refuse to face a thing. They can choose not to face it as an act of will.’

Anita wasn’t really listening to Paula; she was winding herself up into a state again.

‘Fuck their family solidarity bullshit. They’re all lying to paint Kendra as a suicidal nutcase. Santino killed her and now … oh … I mean, it’s stupefying to sit in that court and watch how quickly the prosecution is crumbling to pieces.’

‘The defence barrister—he’s obviously clever,’ said Paula.

‘Oh yes, the man is an evil wizard. Woodburn gathers up all the evidence that shows Santino is guilty and then uses his sorcerer alchemy to transmute it into evidence she killed herself.’

‘What does Rohan say about the way the case is going?’

Anita shrugged. ‘When I ask, he goes quiet and weird with me. So then I worry he thinks it’s inappropriate for me to talk to him about it. Professionally inappropriate, I mean. Or maybe he thinks it’s unhealthy for our relationship to bring this toxic stuff into it. Do you reckon that’s what he thinks?’

‘I don’t know. Ask him.’

‘If I push—“Come on, what do you think is going to happen?”—he says, “The jurors aren’t crazy.” Which is probably right, don’t you reckon?’

‘I guess so. I don’t know enough about how it works.’