Paula stood at the basins and dabbed cold water on her temples and neck to calm down. Faced with herself in the mirror, seeing the blonde hair, she was jolted by images of Brooke and Kendra and then of Rochelle. As she stared at her reflection, her own long hair became Stacey’s beautiful hair splayed out on Paula’s living room floor soaked in blood. Her heart rate shot up and her breathing accelerated. This was PTSD. This was a kind of insanity. She was in no fit state to make extreme choices. She needed to find some professional psych help. And right now, she needed to go straight home and avoid doing anything crazy.

By the time she’d settled herself enough to head back out into the bar, John Santino was standing up beside the booth where they’d been sitting.

‘Hey, listen, while you were gone, I did some thinking,’ he said with a seductive smile. ‘Staying in this dump is making both of us depressed. Let’s go to my place.’

Paula was on the edge of saying no, making an excuse to slide out of there quickly and never come back. Then she saw Santino lift his glass to drain the last of the bourbon, and she noticed the ropy tendons in his wrist. His shirtsleeves were folded back to the elbow to reveal his powerful forearms. Paula imagined those arms heaving Kendra Bartlett over the guardrail and slamming Brooke Lester against a table. She imagined him picking up baby Ava with his strong hands and shaking that tiny body until her head flailed back and forth on her fragile neck.

‘Sounds good,’ Paula said.

Santino slid his arms into his leather jacket and handed Paula her coat, smiling as if he’d always known she would accept his invitation.

‘Is it far?’ asked Paula. ‘Can we walk? Be good to sober up a bit.’

As they walked the half kilometre to his apartment, Paula found she could manage surprisingly well on the high heels, having grown accustomed to them over the last three nights.

Santino was clearly drunk and at one point he had to grip the edge of a bus shelter to steady himself. He talked nonstop. It was destiny that the two of them had met tonight because they had so much in common. He understood her grief because his girlfriend died around the same time as Paula’s husband. Like her, he was nowhere near over it. And then, with all the pressure from the police and the court case and some other shit that was going on in his life right now, he was feeling the pain of it hard.