She points up and down me. ‘This isn’t so bad.’

‘It fucked up. My body fucked up.’

‘How do you know that? It could have been his faulty sperm. It just happened to happen inside your body.’

‘I wish I could get out of it.’

‘You know what I read the other day? The egg is an aggressive cell. The sperm isn’t the only one with a mission. Women’s bodies have a plan. They just get called crazy for it.’

‘I think I probably have quite aggressive eggs.’

‘I definitely have aggressive eggs.’

‘But I have no integrity, so it’s no surprise it didn’t stick.’

‘You’re being too hard on yourself.’ She swallows. ‘I take it back,’ she says after a moment, ‘you’re not a child. You grew up while the man you were with didn’t have to.’

‘Maybe. To be honest, I still feel like a child pretending to be an adult.’

‘And your best friend didn’t know what you were going through because you were doing your “I’m fine” dance all over town.’

I sense Kelly searching for the next question. I think this is how it will be between us now, for a while and maybe forever. Careful, not careless.

‘How’s it going with your mum?’ she asks.

‘Okay. Thanks for getting together with her, for me.’ She blushes a bit. I sit up in my seat. ‘I’m writing about her, actually.’

‘I saw. Does she know?’

‘No, I don’t think so. She owes me, anyway.’

Kelly looks unconvinced. ‘The eternal debt.’

‘She’s been texting Art. It’s too dire to go into.’

‘She does care about you, you know.’

I glance at my watch. Our fifty-five minutes is almost up.

‘We should do this every week, at least once,’ I say. ‘Let’s make a regular arrangement and honour that. Have a think about when would suit you best and we’ll try and coordinate our diaries.’

Kelly laughs. ‘Sounds very formal.’

‘Maybe it needs to be. Maybe if it isn’t it won’t survive these next years of our lives.’

Kelly says: ‘Why don’t you and Carmen come over for a roast on Sunday. Sonny would like to see you. He says to tell you he’s created a gif of your song and it’s doing really well.’

‘Tell him that is very comforting. That knowledge bathes me in comfort.’

Kelly puts on her coat. She sighs. ‘I was very hard on you.’ She sighs again and blows the air out through pursed lips. ‘On reflection, I don’t know where quite all of it came from. I suppose I am a bit jealous sometimes about your freedom to give a shit about the meaningless things. I have to plan everything I give a shit about. Very little of it is accidental.’

I hug her. She hugs me back.