Luca had been furious about the article. He’d been out the night before volunteering at the safe haven again and was reading the paper during breakfast the next morning. “Can you believe this?” he said to Anika, who’d been leaning against the counter, sipping orange juice.

Luca swore under his breath. That had Sam and I quickly turning to each other, and Anika raising her eyebrows at us and shaking her head.

“The paper has completely mangled what happened—or else made it up!” Luca said. “They’re making out like it was an organized protest, as though the refugees were spitting in our faces. . . .”

“What happened?” Sam asked. “I mean—what really happened?”

“There was a family with a grandmother in a wheelchair, and when they found out that the shared bathrooms and toilets are nearly five hundred meters away from the dorms, they got the translators to explain that she wouldn’t be able to use them.” Luca rubbed a hand over his head. “The translator told the officials—who said they couldn’t do anything, and it was either this or . . . nothing.”

“What did they do?” I asked.

Luca started rolling up the newspaper. “Whatever the refugee family could to get some help for the poor woman—they didn’t want to see her soil herself in the middle of the night because she couldn’t get all the way to the toilet in time, and the bathroom doorway wasn’t wide enough for her wheelchair anyway!”

“Wait—are the kids supposed to use those toilets in the middle of the night too?” Anika asked, a frown forming. “That would scare the bejesus out of me in that creepy place! Imagine asking a kid Fred’s age or Sam’s to go wandering around outside in the middle of the night to find the toilet.”

Luca stood up so quickly that the chair fell down behind him. He strode over to the trash can, lifted the lid, and shoved the newspaper in, down deep.

Anika was rubbing her belly with one hand, and when Luca came over she reached her other hand out to gently touch his back.

“You know what the government reps said to all that?”

“Babe—” Anika started to say.

“They said it was a ‘totally unreasonable’ complaint and suggested they could send the family back to Kosovo if they were ‘dissatisfied’ with Australia. Can you believe that?” Luca sighed. “They gave the family a bedpan, and between that or going back to the bombings, they chose the bedpan.”

At the rocks that lunchtime, it was Sam who spoke up. “That’s not true!” he said. “Luca’s been there and he knows what’s happening, and he says none of that is true!”

Aidan held his hands up, like he was surrendering. “It’s what my dad said. He thinks they’re ungrateful and kicking up a stink just because they can.”