The sun seemed both a hundred times brighter, as if the rain had washed it too, and a hundred times less savage, as if the water had also cooled it. Jed hadn’t known how much she had missed the song of the river, twisting its way around Dribble’s hill. Birds sang. Birds she thought had gone, but who had just been waiting, not wasting energy on song.

Sam drove in to the factory to reassure himself there’d been no water damage, no drips onto electric circuit boards. He only needed a walking stick now, though he still tired easily. Jed sat at her typewriter while Mattie created a story for herself on the veranda, using dolls as characters and a cardboard box, two saucers and some spoons as props. ‘Mum, I need banksia men!’ she called.

‘Okay, darling. Don’t go beyond the gate.’

‘No,’ said Mattie indignantly. She always did obey instructions. It was the ones Jed hadn’t thought to give her — ‘Do not climb to the top of the wattle tree and jump down’ or ‘Do not try to harvest honey from the native bee nest on the rock because they are native wasps, not bees’ — that led to trouble.

Mattie had been gone perhaps five minutes when Jed felt the earth shake: a strange vibration with no noise. The roar came seconds later, lashing, crashing, unlike anything she had ever heard.

Earthquake? She ran to the front door, gazed out. The earth was still. Everything seemed normal. But there was no sign of her daughter. ‘Mattie!’ she yelled.

Something lay just down the hill. A scrap of dress, brown legs, a limp body, a bloody arm held in Maxi’s jaws, the old dog clinging to it, tugging at it, like the ancestral wolf had finally found the bone she’d dreamed of all her domesticated life.

‘Maxi! No!’ Jed screamed. Had the dog gone mad in its old age? Doberpeople were guard dogs after all . . .

She ran out to pull the dog away, but the vicious jaws were already open. Mattie’s arm dropped to the ground, the teethmarks showing a trickle of blood. Maxi dropped too, panting, her fur wet, wet as Mattie’s body, sodden as her hair.

‘Mattie!’ Jed cradled her, felt her breathing, saw her eyes were open, frightened, even if she seemed too terrified to move.

‘Mummy! Mummy!’

‘It’s all right, darling. You’re safe.’ She turned her back on Maxi, in case the dog went mad again. ‘Bad dog! Bad dog! Stay!’ she shrieked, for what else was there to say that a dog might understand? Would she have gone for Mattie’s throat next? Would it always be like this? Everyone she trusted betraying her? Matilda vanishing from her life by dying, Sam suddenly unconscious, Maxi turning vicious . . .