Paula shrugged and smiled. Even after all these months, Anita was struck by how different her friend looked. The blonde dye had grown out but Paula still kept her hair cropped very short. Her face was gaunt, with a scar around her eye socket where the butt of Curtis Wigney’s rifle had connected. Her body was way more muscular from the tenacious fitness and martial arts regime she was following in jail. Her voice was different too, with a permanent husky tone from the strangulation injury to her throat.

Once the two women started talking, Anita would look into Paula’s eyes and listen to her speak with such concern for fellow inmates, her plans to fix problems for everyone in her orbit. Anita would feel reassured that under the layer of prison uniform and toughened body, the old tender Paula was still there. But underneath that was another even deeper layer—the part of this woman that would always be altered because of what had happened, in ways that only Anita fully understood.

‘Anyway, enough of me blathering about stuff in here,’ said Paula. ‘Tell me how the pregnancy’s going. Is your heartburn still bad? When’s the next scan? Have you and Rohan found a new place to live? Now I wish I hadn’t sold my house so fast—you guys could’ve lived there.’

Paula had put the Earlwood house on the market when she first went to jail, then arranged, via a lawyer, to give a generous chunk of the proceeds to the two men she’d assaulted. Anita understood and respected that impulse, but she was trying to persuade Paula to keep enough money from the house sale so she could buy a small flat after her release. It was unclear how Paula would make a living once she was out, having been deregistered as a doctor.

Within the jail, she’d very quickly become known as The Doc, like something out of a cheesy prison movie. Some inmates needed convincing that Paula wasn’t going to act snobby because she was a doctor, but once word spread about The Doc’s story—she’d been almost killed defending two kids from a violent man—it earned her a degree of respect from her fellow prisoners.

Paula could talk endlessly to Anita about the vulnerable people she’d met in there, women trapped in abusive relationships, likely to be sucked back into those risky situations once they were released. She would launch into her slightly bossy benign doctor mode with some of the women, especially the younger ones, making sure they knew their legal rights and the resources they could use, urging them to learn self-defence techniques, encouraging them to believe they were worth more than being bashed and terrorised. Maybe the women were prepared to accept her helpful bossiness because they sussed out that Dr Kaczmarek truly didn’t think she was morally superior to anyone.