‘Paula. It’s all good. Well, I mean, not all good obviously, given you’re lying there half dead and we’re both facing heavy-duty charges—but don’t forget you saved those kids. You saved those kids.’

Paula flapped her hand in the air. ‘Don’t make me cry. Don’t set me off. Crying hurts my throat too.’

Anita reached out her arms to hug her. It was tricky—with drips and catheters and battered body parts to be avoided—but the two women managed to fold each other in close.

TWENTY-FOUR

THE SEATBELT CHAFED ACROSS ANITA’S BELLY, WHICH WAS sticking out quite a bit now she’d hit the six-month mark in her pregnancy.

The prospect of the baby had gone some way to improving relations between her and Rohan’s parents. The Mehta sisters had been lovely to Anita from the start, but the parents were, understandably, unnerved by the idea of their son shacking up with a woman who’d shot a man. Rohan promised her their last stiff layer of caution would melt away once the baby was born.

Anita always expected her parents, brothers and extended family would love Rohan, but under the circumstances in which they met him—as the lovely supportive boyfriend of a woman charged with murder—their positive assessment of him had spun up to the level of nauseating adoration. Rohan was considered so saintly, as well as being handsome with beautiful manners, the Delgado family felt the need to constantly remind Anita how very lucky she was to have him. Rohan claimed not to notice his perfect-man-beyond-anything-Anita-deserves status and that only irritated her more.

During the period the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions was considering her case, Anita took leave without pay from the newspaper. She was now the subject of media stories, facing criminal charges, so it would be untenable and ridiculous to work as a journalist in the courts.

She used the time off to revisit the research she’d done into domestic violence and develop it into a book. Whether she liked it or not, Anita’s personal story would always be connected to this material, now that she was notorious in a small way, so she gave in to that new reality and wrote about Stacey and about her own experience of shooting a man, including selected details about Paula.

All along, everyone kept assuring Anita the DPP would eventually drop the murder charges against her once they’d shuffled sufficient paperwork around for sufficient time. Even so, when that decision came through three months after the Wigney shooting, her relief was so overwhelming she began to hyperventilate and had to rush to the ladies and breathe into a paper bag to recover.