Even Cooper seems to understand that it’s not up for discussion. ‘Fair enough. What did you do when you were over there? I’ve only ever been to Asia, and only for a couple of weeks. Mum took me to meet all my relatives in Singapore. I can’t imagine being away from Australia for three years—I’m a real homebody.’

‘I thought all millennials want to take off overseas?’

‘Not this one,’ he says cheerfully. ‘I want to make my career in Melbourne. I mean, it’s a great city, why not?’

Oli casts her mind back to that time, when she was working in bars and pubs. Waitressing. Writing snippets here and there, documenting the people she met, the things she saw. It was a dreamy, wonderful few years of anonymity, the perfect antithesis to everything she’d left behind and the drama yet to come. She kept to herself, alone in crowds of people. She started dabbling in drugs, weed, pills, and enjoyed dancing for hours with strangers then going home on her own.

‘You should think about it,’ she says. ‘Take a gap year or something. I loved it. I worked in bars mainly, but I wrote as well, travel pieces and articles about being an Aussie in Europe. A lot of them got picked up here and in the UK. It helped me get a job when I finished my degree.’

‘You studied journalism?’

‘Arts. I started doing law, but I switched out after a year. I wanted to write. But journalism has changed a lot since then. Maybe these days I would make a different choice.’

‘Half my uni subjects covered the impact of social media on journalism.’

‘Yeah, there’s that, and just the overall sense you’re always just scraping the surface now. The news cycle is a lot faster than it used to be.’ She laughs, self-conscious. ‘That probably makes me sound really old.’

With a nod, he looks out the window.

She rolls her eyes. ‘Anyway,’ she says lightly, ‘that’s why a story like this is interesting. It’s not just about the reporting—there’s the chance to dig a bit, push people to talk. It’s not over in a day. It has some depth.’

They stop for a red light. Nearby, a young woman, her thin legs pale and bare under a fluffy tan coat, leans back against an old Telstra phone box, her heavily made-up eyes half closed. A white ute pulls up next to her, and she stands to attention, smiling and leaning into the passenger window.

‘I thought street prostitutes were illegal?’

Cooper’s tone is so naive that Oli has to stifle a laugh. ‘I think the cops pick their battles. Like the rest of us.’

He nods wordlessly, watching as the girl swings herself into the ute.