Penelope’s eyes were wide with disbelief, peering through her window at the desolate site. A high-vis vest appeared through the smoke: a rescue worker, approaching Jack’s window. She wiped long strands of her hair from her eyes and I recognised her as Joanne Morris, limping after yesterday’s fall.

‘Captain Laskin, we’re out of blankets.’

‘I’ve got some.’ Jack touched Penelope’s hand comfortingly. ‘You stay here.’

I helped him carry the blankets. We crunched through spaces that were once rooms. Two ashen forms were the size of children – students of mine?

Jack covered each with a blanket, ready for the medical examiner. He held his phone to his lips, describing what he saw. ‘One, two… four bodies. Insufficient evidence to establish age or gender.’

Then we returned to his vehicle. Jack’s phone rang. He answered and the flare of his nostrils said he didn’t like what he was hearing. Eventually he spoke again, his voice tight with smoke and anger. ‘I have work to do where I am! I was told yesterday I could focus on what matters. I shouldn’t leave Brunton. It’s a stupid waste of resources.’

More silence, then he disconnected, lips white. ‘I’ll get you home, Phoebe. Penelope, I’ll take you to the refuge. If you’re okay with that?’

Penelope nodded numbly and continued staring. We had to get her away from here. Jack turned back to me and spoke more quietly. ‘Then apparently I have to attend another press conference. Bloody waste of time – there are so many things we could be doing to help. But Brendan Hurd is my boss.’

We drove on through the smoke and the glow and the eucalypts. Fire had attacked as if determined by a coin toss. Houses that should have been safe – where the only trees grew far from the roofline, for instance – were reduced to charcoal heaps, tin roofs all bent and distorted like insects hovering there. And other houses, surrounded by flammable bush – sometimes now reduced to ashes and charcoal – still stood.

‘Press conferences are not why I joined the CFA,’ Jack said. ‘This one’s probably on because the PM wants people to notice he’s home.’

Passing between two blackened rows of smoking charcoal trees, we reached the top of Anzac Avenue. ‘We’re nearly at your place, Phoebe. Sorry it’s taken this long…’

‘I knew it wouldn’t be an easy drive.’

My house had survived, standing in its burned-out garden, as had Rosie’s next door. The houses on either side were gone. The house down the street where Kylie Hart ran her therapy business had been completely destroyed. I remembered her previous advice about Caleb. Talking always helps, she’d insisted. At the edge of my driveway, molten metal had run from the carcass of Caleb’s inherited four-wheel drive like blood settling into a silver scab on the ground.

Penelope was white in the back seat.

‘You’ll be fine. I’ll see you later. Okay?’