You can suck my c**k for $20! Any time, any place.

Hey, pretty little girl, I’ll f**k that tight little cunt of yours for free.

Madeline pushed herself back away from her desk, the taste of bile in her mouth. “How do we shut this website down right now? Do you know how to shut it down?”

She was pleased to note that she hadn’t lost control, that she was speaking as if this were a work crisis: a leaflet that needed reprinting, a mistake on the theater website. Nathan was tech savvy. He must know what to do. But as she clicked off the comments page and saw the photo of Abigail again, her innocent, ridiculous, misguided daughter—vile men were thinking and saying vile things about her little girl—her anger rose volcanically from the pit of her stomach and burst from her mouth.

“How the hell did this happen? Why weren’t you and Bonnie watching what she was doing? You fix it! Fix it now!”

Harper: Has anyone told you about Madeline’s daughter’s little drama? I mean, I hate to say it, but as I said to Renata at the time, she was over at my place for dinner I think, I said, “Now, that wouldn’t happen at a private school.” I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with public high schools per se, I just think your children are more likely to interact with, you know, a better class of person.

Samantha: That Harper is so up herself. Of course it could have happened at a private school. And Abigail’s intentions were so noble! It’s just that fourteen-year-old girls are stupid. Poor Madeline. She blamed Nathan and Bonnie, although I don’t know if that was fair.

Bonnie: Yes, Madeline did blame us. I accept that. Abigail was in my care at the time. But that had absolutely nothing to do with . . . with the tragedy. Nothing at all.

58.

After their visit to the psychologist, Jane drove Ziggy down to the beach to have some morning tea at Blue Blues before she took him back to school.

“The special today is apple pancakes with lemon-spiced butter,” said Tom. “I think you should try some. On the house.”

“On the house?” frowned Ziggy.

“For free,” explained Jane. She looked up at Tom. “But I think we should pay.”

Tom was always giving her free food. It was starting to get embarrassing. She wondered if he had somehow gotten the impression she was poverty-stricken.

“We’ll work that out later,” Tom said with a little wave of his hand, which meant that he wouldn’t accept any money from her, no matter how hard she tried.

He disappeared into the kitchen.

She and Ziggy both turned their faces to look at the ocean. There was a brisk breeze blowing and the sea looked playful, with white wavelets dancing across the horizon. Jane breathed in the wonderful scents of Blue Blues and felt an intensely nostalgic feeling, as if the decision had already been made and she and Ziggy were definitely going to move.

The lease on her apartment was up for renewal in two weeks’ time. They could move somewhere brand-new, put him into a new school, start afresh with their reputations unsullied. Even if the psychologist was right and Ziggy really was experiencing bullying himself, there was no way that Jane could make the school consider that a possibility. It would be like a strategic move, as if she were countersuing. Accuse me of damages and I’ll accuse you right back. Anyway, how could they possibly stay at a school where parents were signing a petition for them to leave? Everything had become too complicated now. People probably thought she’d attacked Harper in the sandpit and bullied Amabella. She had made Amabella cry, and she felt terrible about that. The only solution was to go. That was the right thing to do. The right thing for both of them.

Perhaps it had been inevitable that her time at Pirriwee would end so disastrously. Her real, unadmitted reasons for coming here were so peculiar, so messed up and downright weird, that she couldn’t even let herself properly articulate them.

But perhaps coming here actually had been a strange necessary step in some process, because something had healed in the last few months. Even while she’d been suffering the confusion and worry over Ziggy and the other mothers, her feelings for Saxon Banks had undergone a subtle change. She felt she could see him with clear eyes now. Saxon Banks was not a monster. He was just a man. Just your basic nasty thug. They were a dime a dozen. It was preferable not to sleep with them. But she had. And that was that. Ziggy was here. Perhaps only Saxon Banks had sufficiently thuggish-enough sperm to get past her fertility issues. Perhaps he really was the only man in the world who could have given her a baby, and perhaps she could now find a fair, balanced way to talk about him so that Ziggy stopped thinking his father was some kind of sinister supervillain.

“Ziggy,” she said, “would you like us to move to another school where you could make brand-new friends?”

“Nope,” said Ziggy. He seemed in a cheeky, quirky, flip mood right now. Not at all anxious. Did that psychologist know what she was talking about?

What did Madeline always say? “Children are so weird and random.”

“Oh,” said Jane. “Why not? You were very upset the other day when those children said they weren’t—you know—allowed to play with you.”

“Yeah,” said Ziggy cheerfully. “But I’ve got lots of other friends who are allowed to play with me, like Chloe and Fred. Even though Fred is in Year 2, he’s still my friend, because we both like Star Wars. And I’ve got other friends too. Like Harrison and Amabella and Henry.”

“Did you say Amabella?” said Jane. He’d never actually mentioned playing with Amabella before, which was part of the reason it had seemed so unlikely that he’d been bullying her. She thought they traveled in different circles, so to speak.