‘See you next weekend then. Love you.’ Scarlett put the phone down, then stared at it as if she could see William on the other end, calling as he did every morning before he headed off for the factory. His STD phone bill must be enormous, but the Whole Australia Factory was finally making good money, thanks to his pre-fab house designs, and so was William. He still lived with his mother in the old manager’s cottage at Drinkwater, spending the weekends with her at Dribble when she came down once a month or so, coming up to Sydney to stay with her once a month too.

She missed him fiercely for days after each time she saw him, just as she missed the taste of tank water, the buzz of bees in the blue salvias Sam had planted under the bedroom windows before his accident — salvias didn’t need much water and the blue native bees loved them. Those salvias might have kept the bees going through the drought, when so many of the small native shrubs they had fed on had been lost to stock, probably forever.

She didn’t like to think of a world without big blue native bees. She looked up at the familiar knock on the door. ‘It isn’t locked!’ she called.

Alex appeared. He looked strangely excited. ‘How many times have I told you this isn’t Gibber’s Creek?’ he demanded. ‘People lock their doors in Sydney.’

‘Given you’ve told me maybe twice a week since I’ve been here, about five hundred times. But no one would expect my door to be unlocked,’ she said reasonably, ‘because everyone in Sydney locks their doors. So no one will try to open it unless I say come in.’

She went into the kitchen to put the kettle on. It still seemed a miracle to have legs that didn’t need instructions like, ‘Lift your left foot, now put it down,’ or even calculations about how much she needed to use them that day and how much they could manage. ‘Lemon tart?’

‘Leafsong’s?’

She looked at him indulgently. Alex knew very well she hadn’t been to Gibber’s Creek for three weeks. But, being Alex, it didn’t occur to him that a three-week-old tart would be stale. ‘No, made by my very own hands.’

‘I’ll risk it.’

She cut a slice for herself too, added ice cream to them both, poured coffee, then sat at the table opposite him. ‘What’s up?’

‘How do you know something is up?’

‘Because I know you well, Alex Romanov, and you didn’t just come here to mooch coffee and lemon tart.’

‘Okay, then. The dean called me in to his office. They’re doing a trial three-year post-grad exchange: residency and research, at New York, the California Institute of Technology, or Edinburgh. The New York one is in cardiology.’