The security guard shuffles his feet. High heels click on the tiled floor behind Alex. Someone coughs. She can’t stop noticing every tiny detail. All she wants is for it all to stop. To sleep through the rest of her life and be born into a new one. To go back in time and choose the other path.

‘Ready?’

She looks at Ruby blankly. All she can see is Evelyn on the hallway floor. Her twisted left leg. Evelyn had told her she broke that leg as a teenager when she fell off her horse. Evelyn’s poor leg looked broken all over again, but Alex never found out if it was. No one cares about a broken bone when you are dead.

Alex hears panting, then a desperate sound of panic. If only they could take it all back.

She is back in the hallway again. Everything is tinted red with Evelyn’s blood.

‘Alex?’ Ruby grabs her shoulders, shakes her. ‘Alex?’

It’s her making the terrible noise, panting like a wounded animal, just like she did at the house that night.

Ruby shakes her again. ‘Alex, come on. It’s time to go in.’

CHAPTER SIX: TUESDAY, 8 SEPTEMBER 2015

CHAPTER SIX

TUESDAY, 8 SEPTEMBER 2015

BOWMAN SEEMS TO LOOK DIRECTLY AT THEM.

‘Down,’ Oli hisses, pulling Cooper to the ground by the tail of his shirt.

Even though she’s crouching, she feels dizzy, catapulted back in time to the moment that will always be seared onto her brain. The body hanging from the tree has caused the old panic to flood back. The heightened state of awareness returns, the painful intensity. The feeling, the knowing, what is at stake and not wanting to think consciously about what she’s doing, just needing to do it. Don’t think, just fix this. Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe, please breathe. The bushland blurs into the pale, upturned face of her mother. Dry lips, glassy eyes. Oli barely registers the empty pill bottle on the floor, just presses her hands against the bony chest, hands sliding in sweat and vomit. Please, Mum, breathe. Please.

‘What do we do now?’ Cooper whispers, oblivious to Oli’s turmoil.

‘What?’ The greens and browns of the bush comes back into focus, the old scene slipping away. ‘We just stay here,’ she murmurs, peering around the rows of tree trunks.

Bowman is still there. The forensic team are wielding a ladder and a stretcher. A large black bag. He gestures to the tree, and they all look up at the body. Oli does the same, properly this time. Long brown hair. Army-green Converses. Small white hands. Bloated face.

Bowman speaks to the group for a few moments, gesturing to the right before he walks back the way he came, phone to his ear.

The forensic team approach the gum tree with a ladder, their faces set in hard lines.

‘Come on.’ Oli’s legs are jelly as she stands again.