It looked real. ‘OK,’ Conway said. ‘Did he ever make you do anything you didn’t want to do?’ You always rephrase this one, keep coming at it from different angles. Scary, how many girls think it doesn’t count as rape unless it’s a laneway stranger with a knife; how many guys do.

Selena was shaking her head. ‘No. Never.’

‘Keep touching you after you told him to stop?’

Still shaking her head, steady and vehement. ‘No. Chris wouldn’t have done that to me. Never.’

Conway said, ‘Selena, we know Chris wasn’t an angel. He hurt a lot of girls. Slagging them, two-timing them, messing them around and then blanking them when he got bored.’

Selena said, ‘I know. He told me. He shouldn’t have done that.’

‘It’s easy to romanticise someone who’s dead, specially someone who meant a lot to you. Fact is, Chris had a cruel streak, specially when he didn’t get what he wanted.’

‘Yeah. I know that; I’m not romanticising.’

‘Then why’re you telling me he wouldn’t have hurt you?’

Selena said – not defensive, just patient – ‘That was different.’

Conway said, ‘That’s what all the other girls thought, too. Every one of them thought she had something special with Chris.’

Selena said, ‘Maybe they did have. People are complicated. When you’re a little kid, you don’t realise, you think people are just one thing; but then you get older, and you realise it’s not that simple. Chris wasn’t that simple. He was cruel and he was kind. And he didn’t like realising that. It bothered him, that he wasn’t just one thing. I think it made him feel . . .’

She drifted for long enough that I wondered if she’d left the sentence behind, but Conway kept waiting. In the end, Selena said, ‘It made him feel fragile. Like he could break into pieces any time, because he didn’t know how to hold himself together. That was why he did that with those other girls, went with them and kept it secret: so he could try out being different things and see how it felt, and he’d be safe. He could be as lovely as he wanted or as horrible as he wanted, and it wouldn’t count, because no one else would ever know. I thought, at first, maybe I could show him how to hold the different bits together; how he could be OK. But it didn’t work out that way.’

‘Right,’ Conway said. No interest in the deep and meaningfuls, but I could feel her clocking that I had been right: no short bus for Selena. She skimmed a finger over her phone, held it out again. ‘See here? After that night on the video, you ignored Chris for a few days, but then you stopped. These here, these are texts from you to him. What changed your mind?’