I couldn’t respond immediately. A police car had pulled out behind me on the corner outside school and I didn’t want to get pulled over. I’d be home soon enough anyway. When the police car took its own turn-off, I’d speed up.

But it took no turn-off. It continued behind me along Main Road through Brunton, then took a turn to the left. Onto Anzac Avenue, my street.

I leaned over the steering wheel, feeling a chill. Our home was ahead, on the hillside, behind a clump of native trees and bushes artfully giving the illusion that they’d always been there. I’d been denying the truth for the past kilometre. The police lights were pushing me home. Something was wrong.

I accelerated.

Stephen, I thought suddenly. I had to call Stephen and tell him what had happened, once I knew what it was. Every metre I drove, every heartbeat, took me closer to it.

An ambulance was parked at the side of the road, its back doors open, a lot of movement inside. Three police officers spoke to each other, looking away from me. Another police car blocked the drive.

Rosie was the first person I recognised. At the end of her yard, near the gaping ambulance, in a billowing grey dress. She wore no shoes, only thick socks – she must have left her house in a hurry. I swung my car onto the council strip, and sprang out of the door.

Time slowed. Hours seemed to pass while I climbed the steep hill, my own drive. I peered behind Rosie. Caleb? Where was Caleb? What was going on?

Police cars.

A fire truck.

An ambulance.

Rosie’s face was white, her eyes red. She pressed one hand over her mouth. A female police officer wrapped an arm around her, pulling her to the ambulance.

I couldn’t make sense of it. ‘What is it? What’s happened?’

Sean’s dog Pattern wagged his tail at me and resumed his puzzled wait. The old four-wheel drive that Stephen’s mother left for Caleb’s eventual use was parked at a rakish angle. Not quite where it should be. Not quite where it was when I left. It could have been dropped carelessly from the sky.

‘That’s the other boy’s mother,’ a police officer told one of the fireys, who looked more fully at me.

The firey’s eyebrows dipped together. I recognised him from somewhere. He was a wiry, long-armed man, with greying once-blond hair brushed back from his forehead and a narrow, even-featured face. I must have seemed confused, or maybe he didn’t know what to do. He stuck out his hand. ‘Phoebe, it’s me. Jack,’ he said. ‘We met at your school?’

I didn’t care. ‘What happened?’

‘There’s been an accident.’

Further down the driveway, timber sleepers held the terraced lawn into place. A police woman sat beside a man wrapped in a brown woollen blanket.