The GPs who’d treated Kendra’s injuries were all questioned in court. Each of the three doctors worked in a different practice. None of the doctors had seen this woman before and none of them would see her again. All three suspected abuse, questioned her, tried to arrange a follow-up consultation, and each felt they could do little in that moment to stop her from disappearing out the door and sinking back into whatever dark world she was living in.

Paula was struck by how convinced Anita sounded, almost evangelical, about the idea that following the Santino trial would be a healing thing, offering the chance for some sense of justice, even if it was only vicarious justice, given the man who killed Stacey would never stand trial. If it helped Anita to talk obsessively about Kendra’s case, then Paula was prepared to listen.

Paula’s thinking about Kendra kept spilling over into thinking about Stacey. Stacey with her face bashed into a swollen, pulpy mess, scrambling to the car to flee the Maryvale property. Stacey kneeling on the floor of Paula’s lounge room as she watched her children being shot in the head.

The rage towards Matt would build up like a painful pressure under Paula’s skin. Sometimes she would deliberately, methodically, summon up the memory of him blowing his head off in her house. She hoped that image would offer swift release of the pressure inside her, like cutting into a cyst to expel the pus. But by the time Matt shot himself, Stacey and the kids were already dead. There was no release in picturing him dead after he’d killed them. That was too late.

Only one fantasy was worth anything: if she rewrote the narrative of that evening so she arrived home earlier. Poppy would be in the shower, Cameron playing Minecraft on his iPad, Stacey unpacking their schoolbags, rinsing out lunchboxes. Paula would see Matt with the rifle before he had a chance to hurt anyone. She would come up behind him silently, with the granite bird in her hand. She would smash the sharpest edge of the bird into the softest part of his temple. She might manage to do crucial damage to his temporal artery but it didn’t really matter. There would be no need to kill him. She didn’t care if he lived or died. She would only need to hit his skull hard enough so he dropped the rifle and went down. The police could have him after that.

Paula realised her hand was in spasm, her body unconsciously rehearsing the action of picking up the chunk of granite. This was disordered thinking, a post-trauma reaction. She had adequate insight into what was happening to her, but insight didn’t necessarily solve the problem.