I chased him. If he wouldn’t be angry, I would. ‘You weren’t honest with me, Jack.’

He ran long fingers over his stubble. ‘Honest?’

I relaxed against a painted sign advertising a special price for tomatoes. ‘Shirley says you stole her house. She still owns the property, doesn’t she? You knew she was missing that day. You kept that secret.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. My mother’s no arsonist.’

‘Caleb isn’t either. No one will ever know the truth. Except maybe Shirley.’

He sucked in his breath. ‘We’ll never know more from her.’

‘I did what I had to do.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘Look, Phoebe, that’s what I was doing too. You know me. I did try to help Caleb giving him that alibi. I got trapped in it but it was what he wanted. My mother was no more guilty than him. I want you to know something.’

He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and unfolded it before passing it to me.

‘My mother kept writing long after people stopped publishing her. She was good, right up until she got sick. You would have loved her. Look.’

LIKE A WOMAN

It’s not really okay to be a woman.

We don’t take enough care of ourselves or are body-obsessed.

We are always too fat or too thin

We always wear too much make-up or look too pale.

We never eat enough unless we eat too much.

We are always fashion victims or out-of-date or frumpy.

In the gym we thrash at cross-trainers

like time machines fired up to take us back twenty years.

Through one-way glass we watch

teenage girls eating Big Macs on the street,

ashing into the gutter, trying to look mature.

There is no age

that is the right age

to be a woman.

He never mentioned my collection again. He didn’t offer to help me again either, though we passed each other in the street outside the new clothing shop that Penelope eventually set up, shortly after a lightning strike was proven responsible for the fire’s ignition. In that heat, once a fire began, no one could put it out.

There was no Brunton arsonist. No goth teenager or ambitious CFA member or deluded elderly woman was responsible for those deaths. It wasn’t that kind of story. That was a history that people invented because accidents are so hard to believe, and you can’t pin a murder on a global weather pattern. Brunton wanted someone to blame and decided on Caleb. I made the same kind of decision. All I had wanted to do was keep my son safe. I lost Jack.

What remained to be discovered was whether I had lost Caleb too.

BEFORE THE BRUNTON FIRE

Nearly home after a late meeting, I’d been driving carefully. Caleb sent me a text.

U said U’d drive me 2 footy prac. Where R U?