I still had responsibilities. I called a meeting to decide how and where to hold classes. People become teachers for a variety of reasons. Some have a passion for their subject and a desire to pass that passion on. Some finish uni with a degree in the arts or sciences and don’t know what else to do. Art history was my first passion. My mother called my undergraduate degree indulgent. ‘Tolerable,’ she continued, ‘if you go on to do postgrad law.’ But I didn’t: I decided to teach, because I cared for children, my own child most of all. I would support my students by holding this meeting. I also wanted to be out in public, to make it clear I was not running away.

After discussing it with Jack and Jeannie, I used the school email distribution list to call a community meeting in an old building, once the station house for a thriving dairy farm, now an expensive hotel – an historic site I’d once have been excited to study. Its ballroom was one of the few remaining rooms in the Yarra Valley large enough for the expected crowd. It was also the place where every spring the CFA held meetings with the townspeople to discuss the predictions for the coming bushfire season. Earlier this season, there’d been major discussion about how prepared the town would be now we were having yet another of the hottest years on record. Even then, a level of frustration had been apparent. Scientists who spoke to us knew how to stop things getting worse, but no politician would take the leadership to make it happen, preferring to speak instead about political reasons why changes couldn’t be made and different ways that it was really someone else’s responsibility. Each year fighting the impression that the town itself was nothing but an older scar on the landscape, concealed beneath the newer scars of smaller recent bushfires, plans were made, probabilities of rain and El Nino discussed, reminders shared about which places were safe places last time, which direction the wind was likely to spring from and what the likely fuel load in its origin.

Be prepared and survive.

Now the road had mostly been cleared, it was a ten-minute drive along the highway, from Brunton to Linlithgow, where Penelope’s parents died. Along the way, carcasses of houses stared at each other across deserted, ashy roads like a row of skulls, each window as blackly devoid of meaning as an empty eye socket. I parked at the end of a long row of cars and approached the front door. A red-haired attendant in a black suit stood beneath a white archway. John Zynda. Caleb’s former AFL teammate. One of the few people who’d visited Caleb in hospital before the accusations started.

I wound down my window. ‘John. It’s good to see you. How are you—?’