‘What if he’s not?’

‘There’s DNA, the baby will match him.’

Indy switched the gas off under the pots and stood for a moment. ‘This is all so unbelievable.’

‘I know.’

‘I can’t handle it,’ Indy said.

Hannah turned away as she felt tears in her eyes.

‘Hey.’ Indy put her arms around Hannah, squeezing her, the smell of her mingling with the spices and overwhelming Hannah.

Eventually Hannah realised Indy was crying too, and squeezed her tighter. They stood like that for a long time, then pulled away from each other.

‘You don’t have to be strong for my sake,’ Hannah said.

‘It’s not like that. We’re here for each other, right?’

‘Right.’

Indy got two plates from a cupboard and began dishing up the food.

Hannah felt ashamed. Mel’s disappearance and death had brought out her selfishness, making it all about her. There were so many other people affected by this, Indy, Mel’s other coursemates, her poor mum and dad, Vic, all her family and friends, huge ripples of grief spreading out across the world.

Hannah’s mind went to Mel’s room, the phone, the pictures, 215then the unborn child, a grandkid her parents would never take to the park or push on the swings.

But it was still Hannah’s grief too. Hannah would never be a favourite aunt to that unborn baby, sneaking her sweets and making her laugh with stories of her mum at university.

She thought about her studies, whether she would be able to go back to learning about forces and particles, the rules that brought the universe together, the subatomic to the galactic, in the wake of all this. She had a tremor of a feeling that if she could just grasp the next thing, the next level of understanding, then all the pieces of the universe would fall into place, the equations would balance, the theories would match data perfectly and the whole cosmos would be aligned. But that wasn’t realistic. There was no grand unified theory, at least not one available to human minds. We were just monkeys scrabbling in the dirt, scratching at the surface of understanding, hopelessly outflanked by the realities of the universe, crippled by the foibles and flaws of human nature. We’ve barely evolved from savages, still carrying millions of years of evolutionary baggage, capable of extreme cruelty, torture, rape, murder, leaving a young woman’s body in the bushes at a golf course with your own unborn baby dead inside her belly as her flesh rotted away and her memories and spirit disappeared.

She stared out of the window at a magpie harassing two blackbirds in a tree. A tiny conflict in the scheme of things, but life or death to them.

‘Excuse me,’ Thomas said in the doorway.

Both women turned.

‘What is it?’ Hannah said.