‘An accident?’

He’d looked at her with the sweetest, most earnest expression. ‘Not an accident.’

Tully nodded. ‘Sometimes people do things on purpose and they don’t know why. Sometimes even I do that.’

‘You do?’

She nodded. Then, in the most classic example of child randomness, he threw his chubby little arms around her neck.

Tully wasn’t sure what she’d done right, but for some reason, she felt proud of that parenting moment. She hadn’t felt anything resembling pride for months. And now Sonny had come along and ruined it.

‘You know what?’ she said. ‘Forget it. You’re here now – you deal with it!’

She threw down the sponge, stood up and walked out the door, even as Sonny shouted after her that he was sorry. She needed to get away. There was too much on her mind. Dad had another wife before Mum. Dad might be an abuser. Mum might have been saving money to get away from him. It felt like everything that she’d trusted to be real and true had turned out to be a mirage and now she didn’t know what or who to believe.

So she drove to Bunnings.

As she entered the hardware store, it was as if she’d slipped into a parallel universe. She was above herself, watching as she perused each aisle. At her last session, Dr Shearer had asked her to describe the feeling she got before she stole something. To her surprise, she’d managed to articulate it fairly well.

‘It’s like that moment when, after being on keto for three weeks, someone walks past you in a food court carrying a baked potato with sour cream and bacon. You can try to think of other things, but thoughts of that potato haunt you day and night. You can try to satisfy yourself with a bit of chicken or an egg, but you know you’re kidding yourself. The fact is, the moment you saw that potato, a clock started ticking until the moment you’d eat it. In most cases, it’s better to just eat it and be done with it.’

Now, in aisle 37, Tully stood in front of a wall of spray paint. She wanted all of it. Everything. She wanted . . . the baked potato.

Her mind was a tumble dryer of thoughts and feelings. The obvious answer was that Rachel was wrong about Dad. Indeed, her theory was nothing more than a cobbled-together jumble of insinuations from less-than-credible sources. But there was some stuff that was hard to explain away. Like the fact that Dad had kept his previous wife a secret. If she really was his wife.

Tully took one tin of spray paint and shoved it into her bra.

As she walked the aisles, memories filled her mind – snapshots, really – of moments with Dad. Moments when he’d been short with her. Moments when he’d pitted her against Rachel for no apparent reason. Moments when he was unnecessarily mean, or rough, or unfair.