Geoff had curly brown hair, didn’t stop fidgeting once. Whenever anyone else spoke he stared at them, squinting, listening, waiting.

Carlos looked like he’d come straight from work, his cuffs and collar unbuttoned, a shadow of a beard across his face.

Beryl reminded me of my nan. But all old people reminded me of my nan.

Frances—Frannie, maybe, I wasn’t sure—had that worn-out mum face that I saw in the park sometimes on my lunchbreak. Like she hadn’t slept in a week and would tell you about her kid’s feeding habits if you looked at her for more than five seconds.

Callum was young, surprisingly young, and looked like he’d come straight from the surf.

Bernie was a nurse. She wore a badge and held a clipboard and she spoke in soft, careful tones that reminded me of the paramedics that had come to Lina’s house that day.

They all looked normal. Bernie was normal, I supposed, but the rest of them too. Like my parents’ friends and people I went to school with—and my nan.

‘My name’s Caitlin,’ I said, when it was my turn to introduce myself. ‘I’m a waitress.’

It was the first time I’d said it like that, and I fought the urge to qualify it, to add that it was temporary and that I used to be a campaign coordinator and I’d been offered acting head of campaign strategy—that I wasn’t just a waitress.

Everyone mumbled hello, and I eyed them with a tight smile, settled in to listen, to find out I was definitely in the wrong place. I was fine. I hadn’t been fine; I’d been careless—the trip, the accident, Dex—but I was being careful now. So long as I was careful, everything would be fine.

I looked at their faces, at Bernie, her badge and her clipboard. This would help, I thought. It had to.

It was Paulie who got me to speak, finally.

Carlos was talking about airbag fatalities, and it was making me edgy. I kept remembering the sound, the rush, the glitter. Carlos didn’t have his licence. His wife did, but she didn’t drive much either. He didn’t like her to. They lived on the train line, so he could get to most places he needed to go, or if not he got a cab. They’re professional drivers, he’d said earlier, safer. I hadn’t known how to answer. He’d been explaining it for my benefit and everyone else had been nodding along, like it all made perfect sense, like the best way to deal with this was to just … not.

It seemed so easy, but it made my stomach hurt.