Eventually, she admitted to herself that she relished the initial rush from the medication—a euphoria that filled the window of time before the drug made her drowsy enough to fall asleep. Paula hadn’t felt any kind of intense happiness for so long. It was astonishing to be reminded what that felt like, even if it was a brief, synthetic version of happiness.

She wasn’t a fool. She understood how addictive these drugs were. She made sure to leave gaps of several days between using them. And when she found she was really craving that brief moment of opioid bliss, yearning for it, she would back off for a good long while. Then there would be a night when she felt the need again.

She had convinced herself this was a phase, temporary and under control, but looking back on that period of her life with an honest gaze, she knew she had been in dangerous territory. And in truth, she had only been saved from sliding into opioid abuse by Stacey.

One evening, Stacey had phoned Paula from a motel in Ballina. In an explosion of anger, Matt had slashed the throats of the three alpacas they kept in the home paddock. Stacey—her face swollen and pulpy, body bruised, ribs broken, all at the hands of her husband—had hustled the kids into the car before they saw the corpses of the animals and driven to the nearest police station. The instant Paula heard Stacey’s voice in that call, a sobering charge of energy went through her body. She never touched opioids again.

Now, in her bedroom at home, sleepless at two a.m., Paula could picture the bottle of Dilaudid Judy had handed over that morning. A small amount of the liquid hydromorphone would mean blessed sleep. Paula felt the vibration along a thread that connected her body lying here in bed with the brown bottle sitting in the locked cupboard at the practice.

She should’ve disposed of it straight away but she hadn’t. She could drive there now and use some but she wouldn’t. She trusted she could fight the temptation because she’d managed it before.

One Wednesday towards the end of the Santino trial, Anita and Rohan travelled into the city together by train. As they walked from the station towards Phillip Street, Rohan made a call, trying to arrange his schedule so he’d have time to duck into Court 3 at some point in the day.

While he was speaking on the phone, there was a bombardment of missed calls from the same number. He frowned and answered the next call.