‘Might keep it on for now, thanks. Feeling a bit frozen through from the walk.’

He shrugged. He didn’t care about taking another look at her body under her coat. In fact, there was no sexual tension in the room, thankfully—that was pretty clear. His only interest was the Dilaudid. Paula held on tight to her handbag, the shoulder strap slung across her torso.

‘I see you hanging on to your bag there, Doc,’ he said with a little hoot of laughter.

‘Ha. Yeah. Do you live here alone?’

‘Well, my current girlfriend’s been living here. She’s away right now.’

Away in hospital having been assaulted, suffering an abruption, requiring a blood transfusion, now nursing a newborn and too afraid to tell the truth about her predicament.

Santino handed Paula a glass with a generous splosh of bourbon.

‘To be totally honest with you, I’m not sure how much longer I can put up with her bullshit,’ he said. ‘She was sweet when we first got together but, fuck me, she’s turning out to be a crazy fucking bitch. Do you mind me saying that?’

She shrugged and Santino chose to interpret that as her being fine with it. He was very drunk now, running off at the mouth.

‘Now she’s sicking the cops onto me all over again. I mean, fuck … I don’t wanna go into the whole thing with you, but my girlfriend, she’s meant to be on my side, right? But now she keeps looking at me like I’m going to kill her or something. And that’s because of the bullshit the cops and those other losers put in her stupid head. She’s driving me crazy, just when everything should be good, you know? Like, last week, we got into a bit of an argument. Because she was giving me the, y’know, the “You’re a bad guy” look—and she got me so riled up …’

He flicked his gaze in the direction of the glass-and-chrome dining table. He didn’t say anything, but Paula understood why: he had slammed his pregnant girlfriend against the hard edge of that table repeatedly.

Again, there were two compelling thoughts suspended in Paula’s head:

This was crazy, and she should make some excuse to leave this place before she did something she would almost certainly regret for the rest of her life.

If she was going to do something, it would have to be now. The time pressure was clear. Because Brooke was still in hospital, no suspicion would fall on her if Santino were to die tonight. If Paula did nothing, it was probable that Brooke would move back in here with him. There was a high likelihood that he would hurt her, maybe kill her. He might also hurt the baby. And then it would be too late for Paula to do anything to keep them safe. She would have missed her chance.