‘You’ll be great. I just don’t want you to work too hard.’

‘Likewise,’ she counters. She thinks she hears him sigh.

‘Also, I want to check you haven’t forgotten about taking the girls to the swimming carnival on Thursday night?’

Shit. She thought the carnival was weeks away. ‘Of course not. I’m looking forward to it.’

‘Okay, great. I really want one of us to be there. Anyway, I better go. I’ll sort dinner so you can eat something decent when you get home. Good luck with your story, I’m sure it will be great.’

Dean and dinner, she thinks as the call disconnects. Before she was with him, all her meals were sporadic and varied. She ate so frequently that meals themselves seemed unnecessary; regular sit-down dinners just weren’t part of her schedule. She ate at her desk, often late at night, usually something salty straight out of a box. On nights off, she and Rusty became takeaway connoisseurs. But Dean believes in the power of a home-cooked meal. He likes the routine of dinner and feels strongly that the family unit should revolve around it.

Oli stares out the window and wonders if he’s finding it hard to adjust to a life with her. Saying yes to his proposal felt hasty but right, an inevitable step forward in their renewed romance. It was her thirty-ninth birthday, and they’ll be married within the year. The synchronicity appealed almost as much as the diamond-studded band he presented to her.

She and Cooper have hit suburbia again, the tapestry of green on either side of the road replaced by large double-storey houses with several cars clogging the driveways. Faded play equipment sits on front lawns beside dirty wading pools full of leaves. Oli thinks about the house on Paradise Street: the knobbly rosebushes in the front yard, the row of shoes next to the door. Evelyn’s bloody body in the hallway.

Oli gets back to work on her laptop, the screen filling with words as she describes the scene at Laker Drive, implies suicide, and briefly recaps the events from ten years ago before finishing with the suggestion that a child might have been in Nicole’s care at the time of her death. Oli skims the piece from start to finish, editing as she reads under her breath. It’s good, punchy, with reveals in all the right places.

‘You do have your licence?’ Oli inquires politely, after Cooper drifts into the left lane before dramatically overcorrecting.

‘I was a late bloomer driving-wise,’ he admits happily, ‘but I got my licence when I was twenty-one.’

She grits her teeth. Surely he can’t be much older than twenty-one now.

‘I think driving this car is making me nervous,’ he explains. ‘My family aren’t really car people, but this is pretty amazing.’

‘Eyes on the road,’ she says pointedly.