But though being with him relaxed my body, it did not calm my thoughts. Jack could sleep. But I could never relax. I was about to betray him. Shirley taking the laptop was a gift. I padded into the sitting room and opened it again. Jack hadn’t changed his password. On his desktop, he had a photo of her, taken forty years ago, with a man who must be Jack’s father. And so that was Jack, that small figure drained of colour the way photos from the seventies have been bleached by time. Jack was Shirley’s child. His relationship with Shirley was the same as mine with Caleb. Would Caleb ever care enough about me to use a photo like this?

I’d been through Jack’s computer before, but this felt different. This was different. Previously I’d searched for material I thought I had a right to know, because it was about Caleb. Now I sought information about Jack’s relationship with his own mother. He had a lot of new files. Some were videos. Careful not to wake him, I used my portable hard drive to copy files I’d check later and went back to bed. Jack was still asleep.

I closed my eyes, thinking of Shirley. Her beautiful poetry. Her frequent depictions of white, for instance, in her Sugarcane Poems. I’d studied ‘Tropical weddings’, and recalled random lines:

My white vows in the church, witnessed by summer.

A chill ran through me.

We should be dusted in white petals or in rice, not ash.

What was it Amanda once said, about Shirley and a kitchen fire? My room could have vanished, I so clearly saw Shirley, in Queensland before she met Jack’s father or even knew of Brunton. Her youth spent lighting fires to harvest sugar. Her youth, which she sometimes relived when dementia led her there?

Jack had been out on the day of the fire, looking for her. Had she been at the fossicker’s hut site? Who was it that Caleb saw at my house? Shirley? In a white cardigan and pale nightie, looking like a smudge… Someone people barely noticed… I had to be careful – if Shirley had been out, Jack would know. Did he? Why conceal it? He wouldn’t reveal a secret just because I made him angry. And I didn’t want to anger him. Was Shirley Laskin the white woman in Caleb’s drawings?

I was always constructing and reconstructing Caleb’s day. Trying to make sense of the different testimonies. Again, I wondered if, when Jack insisted he saw Caleb close to the ignition time, he could have been lying about the place. What if Jack hadn’t seen Caleb near Brunton, but near the ignition site? What if Jack wasn’t only giving Caleb an alibi, but also his mother – and himself?