McKenna didn’t know what face to wear, for any of us, so she looked down at her hands clasped on the desk. She had layered up her makeup but she still looked ten years older than that morning. The office looked older too, or a different kind of old. The sunlight had given it a slow voluptuous glow, packed every scrape with a beckoning secret and turned every dust-mote into a whispering memory. In the stingy light off the overhead bulb, the place just looked worn out.

The social worker – not the one from that morning; a different one, fat in floppy tiers like she was made of stacked pancakes – didn’t ask questions. You could tell from the fast sneaky glances that her job gave her more piss-sprayed blocks of flats than places like this, but she just said, ‘Well! Time we were getting some sleep. Off we go,’ and held the door open for Rebecca.

‘Don’t call me we,’ Rebecca said. She got up and headed for the door, not a glance at the social worker, who was clicking her tongue and tucking in her chins.

At the door she turned. ‘It’s going to be all over the news,’ she said, to Conway. ‘Isn’t it?’

‘I haven’t heard you caution her,’ the social worker said, pointing a waggy finger at Conway. ‘You can’t use anything she says.’ To Rebecca: ‘We need to be very quiet right now. Like two little mice.’

‘The media won’t use your name,’ Conway said. ‘You’re a minor.’

Rebecca smiled like we were the kiddies. ‘The internet isn’t going to care how old I am,’ she pointed out. ‘Joanne isn’t going to care, the exact second she gets online.’

McKenna said to all of us, one notch too loud, ‘Every student and staff member in this school will be under the strictest instructions not to make any of today’s events public knowledge. On or off the internet.’

We all left a second for that to fall into. When it was gone Rebecca said, ‘If anyone goes looking for my name, like in a hundred years, they’re going to find mine and Chris’s. Together.’

That shiver again, hard as a spasm.

Conway said, ‘It’ll be headlines for a few days now, a few days later on.’ She didn’t say during the trial. ‘Then it’ll go off the radar. Online, it’ll drop even quicker. One celebrity caught shagging the wrong person, and this is yesterday’s news.’

That curled the corner of Rebecca’s mouth. ‘That doesn’t matter. I don’t care what people think.’

Conway said, ‘Then what?’

‘Rebecca,’ McKenna said. ‘You can speak to the detectives tomorrow. When your parents have arranged for appropriate legal counsel.’