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‘You can do better. You never needed Julian to be your director, or to spark your curiosity about filming crocodiles. Julian was your excuse to get here. And now you’re here, you’re hesitating.’

‘I am not.’ She lifted her chin in defiance.

‘You are. You’re following me around like I’m your director, telling you what to shoot.’

‘For your investigation,’ she snarled at him. ‘And I’ve directed movies before.’

He crossed his arms over his broad chest.

Why did he have to look so good, when she was so mad at him?

‘Alright then, shortcake, tell me the last movie you directed.’

She hesitated, stepping back from him, the frown low over her brow.

‘Tell me.’

‘Arsehole.’

‘Did you only just work that out, huh?’ He sneered at her.

She wasn’t going to put up with this and turned away. ‘I’m not—’

He held her arm. ‘What are you so afraid of?’

‘Shouldn’t I be asking you that?’

‘I’m afraid you could get killed by being near me. It’s almost happened twice now.’ The sincerity in his voice made her chest ache for him, dousing her anger.

‘What? The hives weren’t your fault. I don’t have a life-threatening allergy to seafood, and Chook—’

‘You don’t get it.’ He shook his head, turning away from her and sitting back down.

‘Tell me.’

‘You tell me first, shortcake. What’s got you all zipped up tighter than a croc’s jaw at feeding time?’

‘Ugh!’ The imagery was disgusting.

Or was he doing that on purpose to piss her off?

Congratulations, arsehole, goal achieved.

She stormed to the bar, dragged out the wine bottle, and poured herself a large glass.

With Stone watching her, she drank mouthful after mouthful, before plonking the glass back on the bar to refill it.

‘I’ll leave money on the table when I go.

’ She dropped the empty bottle with a clink into the recycling bin.

‘Are you going to tell me? Or would you like to sit here and angry drink with me?’

She grinned. Didn’t mean to, but he was right, they were both drinking angrily. It wasn’t healthy.

She returned to her chair beside Stone’s, with its great view of Finley’s Pond through to the glass panels of the boys’ fancy pools. It was peaceful with the setting sun creating the perfect backdrop for sharing a conversation.

Only, this conversation wasn’t the easiest one to share.

But if she did, then maybe Stone would tell her what was wrong. So she inhaled heavily and began…

‘I used to produce movies all the time. As a kid, I always had a video camera in my hand, filming life, the family, the bus ride to school, the oval, lunchtime, all sorts.’

‘Is this where we get to the juicy part?’ Stone crossed his ankles as if bored already. ‘I’m guessing you filmed something you shouldn’t have?’

‘There was a team of us working on an exposé for our end-of-year film project. There was Suzy, who wanted to be a journalist—always checking herself out in the mirror as the ultimate camera hog’.

She rolled her eyes, hoping to lighten the heavy mood created by this trip down memory lane.

‘We had a director, Ian, who I had the biggest crush on, and would stupidly follow everywhere.’

She ignored Stone’s raised eyebrow, considering she’d been following him around everywhere, too. But she didn’t have a high-school crush on Stone.

Right?

‘And we had Nelson manning the microphones. Nelson was so incredibly talented with sound editing that he now works in the US for this company that makes video games.’

She hung her head low, staring into her wineglass. ‘And then I ruined everything.’

‘How?’ Stone sat higher in his seat.

‘I was filming B-roll for our latest exposé, about the school’s sports department.

It was such a lame subject, now, but back then it was so big to us…

You see, the school would spend all their funding on the school’s football team, giving them all the attention, awarding them with these dumb awards for just showing up to class, for handing in homework on time, or wearing uniforms so many days in a row. It was stupid.’

‘Were you jealous?’

She shrugged. ‘Yeah, I’ll admit, at the time I was.

You see, Nelson and I both got an internship to work on this movie being filmed on the Gold Coast, and the teachers said nothing.

Even when I got accepted into film school, they never acknowledged it.

And I wasn’t the only one, there were loads of other students who had all these amazing academic achievements that no one said anything.

But they treated the football team like they were heroes, forgetting all about the other achievers in that school. Until we ripped the school apart.’

‘How?’ Stone cranked his chair almost upright, coming level with hers.

She sipped on her wine, looking for Dutch courage.

‘Go on…’

‘I filmed their football coach giving steroids to his players,’ she said in one quick breath.

‘You what?’ His eyebrows shot up in surprise.

‘Nelson was with me. He was skilled in using the parabolic microphone, that could capture ambient sounds. But the modifications he’d made allowed us to pick up conversations on the other side of a football field.

It’s the same sound equipment I use today to hear the flutter of a butterfly’s wing, if I set the—’

Stone waved his beer at her. ‘Back to the story, especially when it’s getting good.’

‘No. It was awful.’ And she felt awful telling it, slumping back into her seat.

‘I’m guessing you dobbed the coach in?’

‘At first, we weren’t sure what to do, because it was so much bigger than us.

So, we went to my parents, who told us to speak to the principal, even if we didn’t want to.

’ She remembered the amazing support her parents gave her during that tough time, especially when it truly mattered, along with lots of conversations about ethics and morals that really did shape who she was today.

‘Did you go and see the principal?’ Stone asked.

Romy barely nodded. ‘But while Nelson and I were talking to the school’s principal, Suzie and Ian stole the backup footage from my locker.’

‘I think I see where this is going.’

‘Suzie saw it as her shot at getting noticed by a television news crew by presenting the story. While Ian saw it as his chance to sell the footage for a quick buck.’

‘So, what was your plan?’

‘Nelson and I had agreed to leave all copies with the principal. You see, he explained there were a lot of students involved, some with prominent sporting careers ahead of them.’

‘Even if they were taking steroids?’ Stone shook his head as he lifted his beer to take another sip. ‘Talk about favouring those footballers.’

‘I bet you made plenty of mistakes when you were a teenager.’ Romy couldn’t help but defend them, even with Stone’s shrug being so indifferent.

‘Being a kid, it’s all about making mistakes, and if you’re lucky enough, you’ll have someone there to help guide you out of it.

’ Thankfully, Romy had her parents for that.

Stone pointed his beer at her. ‘But you did nothing wrong. That coach did, and those students must have known the risk of taking steroids.’

‘But I didn’t want to play judge and jury—I didn’t want to destroy those student’s futures either.

The principal promised us he’d do what he could to help those students.

But he warned Nelson and me it would take time, as he had to speak to their parents individually.

It was a huge issue, and it needed to be done delicately.

And kept quiet. We were willing to take it to the grave, so to speak.

It would have been so much easier if it had gone to plan… ’

‘Let me guess, Ian and Suzie let it out on YouTube or something.’

Romy took another deep gulp from her wineglass. If she could swim in it, she would.

‘Easy does it.’ Stone tugged on her glass.

Now why did Stone have to be nice again. It’d be easier if he wasn’t.

‘How did this Ian and Suzie ruin everything, when they were exposing something that was seriously wrong. Steroids in sports, but with teenagers.’

‘It was done the wrong way. Publicly, instead of just keeping it to those involved.’

‘Go on…’Stone sat very still, his focus so intense she had to look away.

‘Well, the football coach got fired.’

‘Did he get any criminal charges laid against him?’

Romy nodded. ‘He ended up in prison. The school got stripped of all their awards for the entire time the football coach had worked at the school—going back ten years.’

‘Ouch.’ Stone even screwed up his nose.

‘Sadly, it also ruined the reputation of all the school’s other teams, like the volleyball teams, the netball teams, the swimming teams, even the chess squad, who all felt the pressure from everyone looking at them as if they’d cheated, too.’

‘But it wasn’t their fault.’

‘The way Suzie presented it on camera, she had sensationalised it enough to say the entire school was involved. But they weren’t. It was just a select group on the football team. That’s all.’

‘But you’re dealing with teenagers. They would’ve read into it their own way.’

‘They did. And it got worse.’

‘How?’

Romy stared at her hands, as those hot flames of shame crept across her cheeks.

‘Some swore they’d never touched steroids, begging for drug tests to clear their names.

But my footage—showing them pocketing the packets as the coach gave his how-to speech—ended their sporting careers.

’ She slowly shook her head, her voice barely a whisper, ‘And out of the ten boys on that film, three of them suicided.’

Stone hissed, shifting in his seat to face her.

She wiped at a pesky tear trickling down her cheek. ‘Wildlife is easier to film, because when you film people, it’s tricky. You never know how they’re going to react. And I was the director, who shot that film—’

‘But it wasn’t your fault.’ Stone gently held her wrist, his thumb brushing softly over her skin, defrosting the chill that came with sharing the past. ‘You didn’t release that footage, your friends did.’

‘If I’d just taken it home with me, like I normally did, they wouldn’t have found it, and the school wouldn’t have been so publicly disgraced. No one would have known—just the students involved, because the principal agreed to take the footage as an anonymous tip, keeping us out of it.’

‘But everyone found out that it came from you?’

She nodded. ‘Nelson and I had to live under this dark cloud of disgrace. As far as the other students were concerned, we became the bad guys for filming something that was illegal. It was a big lesson on the ethical ways to do a film, the right way.’

‘That’s why you kicked up such a fuss with Julian and quit the day we met. It wasn’t just ethics, it was your personal morals, too.’

She sighed, gazing at Stone, the handsome pilot with an empathetic soul, who cared about people—he just didn’t like them to see that.

There was more to Stone than he let on.

‘You may have made me sign that NDA, but I wouldn’t have needed it.

I wouldn’t have used the poor Rowntree’s situation of stolen stock to sensationalise it into a film like Julian would have.

Like most journalists would have… But I am not a journalist, and I don’t create films about people.

I do documentaries where Mother Nature is the star of the show, and I follow her lead.

’ Where it was a dynamic world filled with wonder, she never got tired of watching.

Stone looked at her differently, in a way that was both unnerving and hypnotic. ‘If you say you’ve learned your lesson, then why are you holding back from producing a film your way?’