‘This is what I remember about Leonie Barratt. She was the cleverest woman I knew – the cleverest woman any of us knew. We let her down because we didn’t see that she was right. If we had listened to her more closely, we might not be where we are now. We might not be living—’ Her throat constricts around the ‘living’, cutting it off at the end, as though to remind Vee that she is barely living at all, or perhaps that she barely has been. Try again, Vee. Not every shot is a winner. ‘We might not be living in a world of Me Too and women’s reproductive rights being rolled back, if we’d listened to Leonie. We might have closed the gender pay gap by now. We might have men who can look after a baby without the world treating them as though they are superheroes.’

There’s applause, sudden and loud, as Vee draws breath. She could swear she smells lavender. Her back aches; her legs are telling her there’s not much standing left in them. She doesn’t always trust what her body says but this she believes.

‘And this is what I remember about the night Leonie Barratt died.’

The room inhales, and Vee looks up, over the heads of those who are waiting to hear what she will say. She looks into the photograph of her friend’s face, the cat-got-the-cream laziness in her half-smile. Leonie, who never apologised. Vee never learned what power there was in that. ‘I remember – nothing. But there are some things that I know. I know that I would never deliberately do anything to hurt Leonie, and she would never have done anything to hurt me. I know that Leonie Barratt and Veronica Moon deserve better than being reduced to one image, on one day. I know that for as long as we keep obsessing over the details of how things look, we will never solve the bigger problem of how the world needs to be.’

There’s applause, again, loud, again, and although it’s meant to show Vee how much support there is for her, for her words, it feels like an attack, each palm meeting palm another brain cell lighting up in agony as it dies.

*

Erica thinks Vee might be gripping harder at the podium, might be wincing, but it’s hard to judge whether the discomfort is at being so publicly on view, or something else. Vee inhales; it’s audible from where Erica stands.

She steps forward, and Vee takes her arm. Together they make their way through the crowd, and out.

In the half-dark away from the gallery lights, Vee looks as though she is already a shadow. Erica has seen this greyness on her before, when she’s in pain.

‘Can I bring you anything?’