‘Anyway, sorry, I’m prattling.’ Anita made a little show of gulping her wine and wriggling her bum firmly into the seat to indicate Paula had her full attention. ‘Please tell me your “v. important thing”.’

Paula stared at the tabletop for a second. ‘You know how we agreed we wouldn’t constantly talk about what happened to Stacey …’

‘But we can, Paula,’ Anita jumped in. ‘Anytime either of us needs to, I reckon we should.’

‘No, of course. And in fact, something happened at work and I wanted to tell you about it.’

Anita nodded, ready to listen.

‘It’s about a patient of mine. A woman. And her husband.’

Paula described Rochelle’s visit to the surgery, the marks of strangulation and other injuries her husband had inflicted on her. She described Brody’s anxiety, maintaining a watchful cordon around his mother.

‘Like Cam,’ Anita murmured.

‘Yes. Made me think about him so much.’

‘So I’m sure you’re trying to persuade this woman to—’

‘Yes, I offered all the usual advice and referrals.’

Paula explained Rochelle’s fears, the husband’s threats to kill her or their child if she ever tried to leave him again.

‘The stats on that are terrible,’ said Anita. ‘The period of time when a woman tries to leave an abusive partner, the risk of him killing her goes way up.’

‘And Rochelle’s husband had the skills and the means to track her.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Anita agreed fervently. ‘That’s a very real danger. A scary percentage of the women in refuges are being tracked electronically in some way by their ex-partners.’

Anita heard herself adopt a slightly lecturing tone with Paula. Since she’d started writing the feature on men murdering their partners, she’d been quoting the statistics to her brothers, her parents, her friends, her colleagues. It wasn’t as if she and her female friends didn’t know this stuff already, but wading into it waist deep, then dunking down and soaking her brain in the horrendous data, had turned Anita into a zealot.

‘What can you do to help that poor woman?’ Anita asked. ‘Oh, don’t tell me she’s—’

‘No, she’s okay now. That’s why I wanted to tell you what happened.’

Paula described Ian Ferguson coming into her consulting room, the threatening way he spoke about his wife, his untreated heart problems, then his fatal heart attack.

‘So he can’t hurt her now,’ said Anita.

‘No. She’s not in danger anymore.’

Anita was relieved—not only to hear that the woman was safe but also to see there was a calmness about Paula: the way she used to be.