Page 53 of That Defining Moment

Lysander rang Hamish from the garden, sitting on the low brick wall that separated Diwa’s patio from the strip of lawn where Colin’s hydrangeas were putting on a show.

“I’m thinking about starting a podcast,” he said, skipping past hello entirely. “Have conversations with people about strange or amazing stuff that happened to them on the internet.”

Hamish was quiet. In the background, Lysander could hear the kettle clicking off and the familiar creak of a floorboard that meant Hamish was standing at the kitchen counter.

“I think that’s a brilliant idea, Sander.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. You’d be good at it.” The fridge opened and closed. “Get your ideas down. Structure, format, the kind of stories you want to tell. When you’ve got it all down on paper, I’ll put you in touch with Meredith Walton. She produces Detour — you’ve listened to it.”

Detour, in Lysander’s opinion, was one of the best interview podcasts going. He devoured each episode, and it was always at or near the top of the download charts for long-form investigative podcasts.

“I’d love that,” Lysander said. “Seriously, Hamish. Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet. She’s terrifying in person. Anyway…you’ll see.” A mug clinked against the counter. “How’s your ankle?”

“Better. Diwa’s got a setup down here that would make you weep. He’s got a broadcast-grade camera, acoustic panels, the lot. He offered to help me build a rig.”

“Of course he did,” Hamish said. “Right, I’m going to hand you over, because someone’s been loitering in the doorway for the last forty-five seconds doing a very poor impression of patience.”

There was a scuffle, and then Cassian’s voice arrived at full volume, mid-thought.

“—Also my therapist says I’m making excellent progress with cognitive restructuring which is when you learn to notice the thoughts that aren’t yours, and I told her about the Ninth Principle and she said it was a textbook example of thought-terminating cliché which sounds very rude but apparently it’s a real academic term—”

He drew breath. Lysander stretched his legs out on the wall and let the evening settle around him.

“—and the inquiry people rang again but Hamish was there and he talked to them first and then he sat with me while I talked to them and I only cried once which is an improvement on last time when I cried four times and had to eat an entire packet of Tim Tams before I could speak again—”

Lysander closed his eyes, tipped his head back, and let Cassian talk.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Diwa spent three hours walking Lysander through the recording setup, which was two hours longer than Lysander had expected to need.

The microphones were intuitive, the camera straightforward, and the editing software laid out clearly. But Diwa’s audio console had more dials than a commercial aircraft, and every time Lysander touched one of them, something unintended happened. A gain knob sent his voice into a feedback shriek that rattled the acoustic panels. He found the reverb by accident and spent forty seconds sounding like he was presenting from inside a cathedral before Diwa reached across and turned it off.

“You’ll get the feel for it,” Diwa said when Lysander’s shoulders bowed forward.

And he did, eventually. Diwa showed him how to set levels, how to monitor the waveform on screen so he could see the peaks before they clipped, and how to export a clean file without accidentally bouncing it in mono. Then Colin’s buzzer went off, two short pulses on the intercom system Diwa had wired through the house, and Diwa was up the stairs before the second pulse had finished, leaving Lysander alone in the basement.

He had time to experiment. That was the thing about staying in a house where the person you’d come to see spent most of the day sleeping or in pain. Colin’s bad days outnumbered his good ones now, and when the headaches hit, the bedroom door closed, the lights were turned off, and the house quietened. Diwa disappeared upstairs. Lysander was left with long, empty stretches of afternoon that he filled the only way he knew how: by working.

His mind maps spread across the basement desk in a growing archipelago of unlined paper.

He’d started with one sheet, a single circle in the centre with PODCAST written inside it in block capitals. By the third day, the circle had sprouted branches that sprawled across seven pages taped together at the edges, his handwriting shrinking as the ideas multiplied. Names of people he wanted to interview sat alongside themes he kept circling back to.

The branches kept converging on the same territory.

He drew a line between ONLINE IDENTITY and REAL CONSEQUENCES and underlined it twice, then added a third line because two hadn’t felt emphatic enough. Every route through the map led him back here. The teenager who posts something thoughtless at sixteen and finds it still indexed by Google at twenty-six, when he’s looking to establish his professional identity. The influencer whose curated feed becomes the only version of themselves that anyone believes. The sex worker whose professional persona bleeds into every relationship she tries to build outside the camera’s frame.

For years Lysander had believed the comfortable fiction that the online world was a place with its own borders. He’d sat across from Dane on the sofa in Knightsbridge and said yes to uploading their first sex video because it was just the internet, just content, just pixels on a screen that would dissolve into the endless churn of porn, get them a bit of money, and be forgotten by Thursday.

He uncapped a marker and wrote, in letters large enough to read from across the room: THERE IS NO “JUST ONLINE” ANYMORE.

Then he sat in the leather chair, adjusted the boom arm until the microphone was positioned the way Diwa had shown him, four inches from his mouth, slightly off-axis, and hit record.

He didn’t have a script. The mind maps were pinned to the wall behind the camera, but he was looking at the red light on the console that told him the file was running, and he was thinking about Dane’s Knightsbridge flat.