But eventually, Jill got to the truth. ‘I told her I liked her,’ he said. ‘I asked her to be my girlfriend and she said she would. But then when I tried to kiss her she pushed me away. So, I hit her.’

It wasn’t that Jill had let it go. She roused on Tony, told him it wasn’t okay. She told him he couldn’t try to kiss someone without their permission, that rejection was never an excuse to harm anybody. She gave him the old mantra: Boys must never hit girls. Of course, no one should ever hit anyone, but sometimes it was hard not to fall back on those deep-rooted parenting conventions.

But she still put it down to him being a child, making immature choices and mistakes. Even as a voice niggled at her that it was a little odd for him to want a much younger student to be his girlfriend.

And again, she didn’t tell Frank. She knew he felt very strongly about boys mistreating girls and that he would have come down much harder on Tony, and that wasn’t necessary. Not when she’d already dealt with it herself. Tony needed love and support, not a swift kick up the backside.

Over the years it kept happening. Little incidents. But each time, they were small enough to dismiss. High school romances that ended badly.

She was a complete bitch, Mum.

Tony! Don’t use that word!

There was a rumour that Darren once mentioned but could never explain — the girls in his grade called Tony the ‘creepy Lewis brother’. Jill had never entertained the idea that they meant creepy in that way. She just thought it was because he was a bit awkward.

There was the time in his late teens that she found the magazine under his mattress. She knew it wasn’t unusual for a teenage boy to be looking at porn. With the things she’d found over the years from her high school students, she’d pretty much expected it. But the strange part was the ripped pages from a Kmart catalogue stuffed between the pages of the magazine. On one side of the catalogue page were grown women modelling lingerie. On the other side, small girls dressed in cute summer dresses.

She didn’t put two and two together. She never imagined it was the other side of the page he was looking at. Or maybe there was a part of her that did suspect but it was too horrific to even consider. So she told herself it couldn’t possibly be the case and she pretended never to have seen it.