‘Nope, didn’t hear anything,’ one of them says.

‘You didn’t, did ya?’ Jem eyes them sceptically.

But now he thinks about it, those seals were probably shot a bit ago, given their withered state. Unlikely that these blokes would have done it. And yet there’s a whiff of something fishy about them. The boy doesn’t have the poker face of his dad and uncles. There’s sure guilt in the set of his eyes and mouth. And they are the type. Jem knows that. He sighs heavily as he wanders back to his boat.

‘Finally,’ Jem says. ‘I was about to send out a search party!’

He’d heard Lucy’s car in the driveway and rushed to the door to greet her. He can’t shake off that feeling of dismay and frustration that has settled in him since he’d left the wharf, and he wants to wrap himself in Lucy’s presence. Not physically: not with sex—sex isn’t distracting at the moment with Lucy’s body how it is while she figures things out. But there are other ways Lucy distracts him: the way she talks to him and gets him to talk to her. That’s what he needs now. He needs her to listen to him, needs her to tell him that the blokes are ‘arseholes caught up in a web of toxic masculinity’. That’s the sort of thing she often says, and it seems genuine coming from her in a way it never would coming from him.

‘Sorry,’ Lucy says. ‘I got a little caught up with … I’ll show you in a second. Help me with the groceries?’

They carry the bags up the steps, in the front door, along the hall and into the open-plan kitchen and living space: the room Lucy turned into a home. The L-shaped kitchen benches and the butcher’s block were there before her, but the stool at the butcher’s block and the blackheart sassafras dining table (which also always seems to double as Lucy’s desk, covered in papers and her laptop), the bookshelves and the pot plants: they were things Lucy brought to the space.

Jem loves this room. He loves the way it makes him feel warm and at ease. He loves the fact that the first time Lucy came to the house, she sat on top of that butcher’s block drinking beer from the stubbie, and while he kissed the salt from her neck, she told him, ‘You know, you really should get a stool,’ like she already had the right to have a say about the place.

While they put the groceries away, he tells her about the seals and the blokes and the kid.

‘I see what you’re saying,’ she says. ‘But Jem, it’s not like you can know that they would have done it, or did do it, or …’ she trails off, frowning. ‘Actually, what are you saying?’

‘I’m just saying that they’re the type that would, you know? And that the boy’s so young. I just hate to think what he’s being brought up to see as normal.’