Oli pulls into the waiting bay at the McDonald’s on Spencer Street, two blocks from the office. Rolls all the windows down and blows a neat line of cigarette smoke skyward, her phone pressed to her ear. She has tried to quit many times since taking it up in her late teens but has never been entirely successful, because she finds it incredibly anchoring. She’s pretty sure Dean knows she smokes, but he never mentions it, and she goes through the motions of hiding the paraphernalia, eating mints and dousing herself in perfume before she comes home. Occasionally at the dinner table he’ll quote some shocking statistic about smoking-related diseases or talk about how some guy from the office is quitting. Oli just murmurs generically while the girls declare their outright hatred for all smokers.

‘Your car smells like fire,’ Kate said earlier, climbing into the back seat of the Audi and wrinkling her tiny nose.

‘Hmmm, it does a bit, how strange,’ Oli replied vaguely, before launching into a one-sided Q&A about the school day ahead.

Now she mutters, ‘Come on, come on,’ eyes on the fast-food restaurant window. The piano music on her call comes to an end and a jaunty violin track begins. As she and the girls left the house, one of the researchers at the paper texted through the phone number of a business where a young woman Oli has been trying to track down allegedly works. The piece Oli’s been putting together, on abuse in the prostitution industry, has been dying a slow death over the past few weeks, but if she can find this woman and get her to go on the record, she might be able to revive it. After a promising chat with the girl’s manager, she’s been on hold for almost ten minutes.

Dawn McGill, Oli’s editor, calls her for the second time since she’s been on the phone. She flicks Dawn a text and gets a response barely a second later: CALL ME ASAP.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ she mutters. Dawn only has one mode: urgent.

Oli scrolls through Twitter while the violin plays. A new pollie sex scandal. A sick elephant at Sydney Zoo. More madness from Trump. Madness everywhere.

‘Here you are!’ chirps a cheerful teenager wearing a headset. She hands Oli her order and flashes a smile peppered with metal. ‘Have a nice day!’

Oli extinguishes her cigarette on the corner of the car mirror and wedges the butt there. Taking a bite of the muffin, she relishes its salty flavour. She used to come here about three mornings a week; she loved nothing more than to park herself on one of the plastic tables upstairs at 6 am with a Bacon & Egg McMuffin and a steaming black coffee, and pound out the draft of a story. But it feels wrong to leave the house when Dean and the girls are still sleeping.