When Caleb spoke, I realised how much that future had changed. ‘I need Genevieve. I need a lawyer.’ He rested his uninjured hand on top of mine. I focussed on his skin, its youth and smoothness, and beneath that skin, the twitching of nerve fibres, muscles, sinews. I made this hand. But I couldn’t control it, or him, or anything that would happen in his life.

Caleb understood the conflict between Genevieve and me. He’d heard it rehearsed often enough. Like Stephen, Genevieve – I never called her Mum – was a lawyer. She was one of Victoria’s first female QCs. Law meant more to her than family. Even before Caleb was expelled and we moved permanently to our summer address, Caleb and I were Genevieve’s part-time life, as now we were Stephen’s.

‘Will it have to be Genevieve?’

‘I’m in trouble. I need to talk to Genevieve. But I don’t want her – organising things for me. Not like last time.’

I sucked in a long breath. Fate was playing tricks with me. This was a distorted version of the moment I’d longed for – Caleb talking to me again. ‘Caleb, there are other issues here. You’re in hospital. The police shouldn’t…’

He shook his head, whiskers grazing my fingertips. ‘I’m eighteen, Mum. I think they’re gunna charge me.’

‘Talk to me.’

I scratched at a scab on my thigh, beneath my jeans. He turned his hands palm-upwards, to grasp mine. An adult gesture. Comforting me. But hurting, his voice had a little wobble in it, that I hadn’t heard since it broke. ‘They’re gunna say I did it. They think I’m an arsonist, Mum.’

‘Caleb? Ms Wharton?’ A nurse stepped in. He checked Caleb’s heart rate and blood pressure and shone a torch in his eyes.

‘Everything seems normal?’ I asked.

The nurse nodded. ‘You’ve got another visitor.’

I considered reporters. Sadie Riley. ‘No press. Send her away.’

‘It’s not a journo. There are plenty of those. But it’s a real visitor. Lawyer. Wig in a bag. Said she was here for your boy.’

Wig in a bag. An image flitted into my mind. Genevieve on her way to work in an imported suit from a Collins Street boutique. Legal robes draped over one arm and, as the nurse said, wig in a bag, tight rolls of ash-tinted horsehair only notionally hidden.

‘She’ll be in the hospital cafe,’ the nurse said. ‘I told her one visitor at a time.’

I imagined Genevieve’s nostrils flaring. She didn’t like obeying orders. But I’d remember this rule about visitors, especially if the police returned. And I needed my mother. She could help. She wasn’t uncaring about her family, I told myself. She’d stretched the limits of her professional ethics to help Caleb before.

In Genevieve’s own language, she wasn’t deficient in her motherly emotions. She’d simply been disappointed in me for my entire life. ‘Really, Phoebe, you’re not serious,’ she’d remarked when Caleb revealed I’d been seeing Jack, that this was why there were two beer glasses in my sitting room. Jack himself had been bundled into the kitchen (a room Genevieve hardly ever entered) the moment her car, unexpected, pulled into the driveway. ‘You’ll end up stuck here forever.’