She looked at the photo again. She had missed the most important thing, she realised. Where the photo had been found.

Not in a photo album, with other photos from parties and picnics over the decades. This had been kept in a drawer where no one else would see it. Not her husband, not the cleaner, not her sons. But, just possibly, by the woman Matilda had left her clothes collection to. Jed. Who would understand.

Matilda had loved this man. Loved him not just as a neighbour. Not as she loved Tommy — Jed had never doubted, nor doubted now, that her great-grandfather Tommy Thompson had been the love of Matilda’s life from the time she was twelve years old to the moment of her death and perhaps beyond.

But she had been engaged to another man during that time. Tommy had even married and been widowed before they came together once again, as they had always been meant to be together. One love, even a great love, does not preclude others.

Matilda O’Halloran had also loved Clancy of the Overflow, who at the age he was in this photo would have been married and, if all accounts were true, deeply happy with his wife, as well as being about forty years older than Matilda.

What would Matilda’s life have been like if she had married a Clancy? A younger one, not the older man here? Would she have spent her life droving with him? Might part of her have longed for that, the part taught by and inherited from Auntie Love? Had there been times when she had yearned for the bush, there in the Drinkwater mansion, giving parties as Mrs Thompson, wife of industrialist Tommy Thompson, a darling, fiercely intelligent man who would never take her droving the long paddock, never sleep in a swag with her and watch the stars.

Should she put the photo back? No. She’d keep it. Have it copied. Give one copy to Julieanne and frame the other. It would stand on the table beside the photos of her family. She should get a copy for Nancy too. No need to say where she found it beyond ‘in a drawer at Drinkwater’, where Nancy might think it had been in an album.

She slipped the photo into her pocket and picked up the clothes Mattie would wear. How much do we know of those we love? she wondered. How much can we truly see about the past? She had spent much of her life now keeping the past alive for generations to come to read about — what had she missed, just as she had never seen what was so clear in this photo?

Clancy smiled at the person who held the camera: not at the camera, but the person wielding it, who back then could only have been Matilda herself.