‘As much as I love your Nancy Drew role-play, I’d appreciate it if you get out of my office and find somewhere else to have this conversation.’ Dawn is reading something on her phone, her right eyebrow jerking toward the ceiling.

They exchange glances as they file out of her office.

‘Apparently Melissa Warren’s landed an exclusive with Nicole’s parents,’ Dawn calls after them, her voice now eerily calm, ‘so just make the fuck sure no one gets to Alex Riboni before we do.’

Cooper is sitting at Oli’s desk watching something on his laptop. The left heel of his huge white sneaker taps against the floor, purple headphones fixed on his ears.

‘Can I help you?’ Oli says sarcastically, placing her computer next to his. She reaches past him to grab her coffee mug. She is plotting out what she needs to do, who she needs to contact. The story is fragmenting in her head, and she needs to pull it into focus, corral it into something more manageable. It doesn’t help that Crystalbrook is so far away—the last thing she needs is another two-hour round trip. Nor does it help that she’s been ordered to secure an interview that wasn’t hers in the first place.

‘Oh, hey, Groves!’ Cooper pulls off his headphones and looks up at her before cracking his knuckles and slurping something unidentifiable from a glass bottle. STICK IT TO THE (HU)MAN runs across his T-shirt in huge black font. ‘You ready?’

‘I’m not ready for anything except a giant coffee. Maybe no one told you, but it’s another big news day, so I don’t have time to sit and chat.’

‘But we need to run through my interview questions.’ He blinks at her dolefully.

‘Fuck’s sake, Cooper,’ Oli hisses. ‘At this rate there won’t be an interview! You haven’t even heard from Alex.’ A thought emerges. ‘Are you sure it was Alex you were talking to?’

He looks offended. ‘Of course.’

‘How?’

‘Well, for starters, her voice is the same. And she knows all about what happened back then.’

‘That would be easy enough to fake,’ Oli retorts. Jesus, she thinks, what a waste of time all the podcast hype will have been if it turns out Cooper’s been duped by some looney. ‘Either way, our interview chances are looking shakier by the minute, so we better get moving on a backup plan, seeing as this podcast is so important to everyone.’

‘We?’ Cooper says hopefully.

‘You,’ she corrects. ‘I’ve got shit to do.’

‘Okay,’ he says, looking glum.

Oli clenches her jaw. She’d happily take Dawn’s unpredictable fireworks over Cooper’s adolescent moodiness. ‘We can speak later. And if you do hear from Alex, the same rules apply—drop everything and contact me.’ She heads to the kitchen, phone in hand as she googles hospitals and GPs in Crystalbrook and the surrounding suburbs.