He always knew when Jed had finished a book. She’d come to find him wherever he was working and just sit, with a smile that was half joy and half incredulity, that somehow history had placed itself on her pages.

Or had it? Sam had never actually read one of Jed’s books. Fiction wasn’t his thing and, too, that first book had been about Matilda. Sam had always been slightly jealous of Matilda’s closeness with Jed. He’d known Matilda all his life, and she’d seemed old all his life too, a generation or more older than his parents, not someone he’d ever know as a friend.

She and Jed had been friends and far more, but he still wondered how accurate Jed’s books really were, for she did intend for them to be accurate, even if lightly fictionalised to avoid offending those who were in them, or descended from them. He was sure Jed had not put in anything that wasn’t true — she was as careful about substantiating her work as any scientist. But what about all she didn’t know?

He suspected that her books were a bit like his experience in his coma. He had been conscious, even if unable to move, for long periods, but when you were locked inside your own brain, you also had time to think about what you had heard and realise that you’d missed great hunks around you too.

Maybe he would read this book. Because if it hadn’t been for Jed’s determination to write it — and Nancy’s generosity in giving it to her — he was not sure he’d have survived that long period trapped in his body, unable to move or plead for something, anything, to relieve the unrelenting darkness he must live in.

But every day he’d had Clancy of the Overflow as well as Rose, and somehow they were more vivid even than Jed reading to him from The Ecologist, or his parents carefully telling him whatever family news they could dredge up each day, or his mates reading him the Gibber’s Creek Gazette.

This book would not be the whole story of Rose and Clancy of the Overflow. But that didn’t matter, he thought, carefully replacing his tools in their designated spots in the shed, just as it didn’t matter that he had missed part of the happenings of the world, including his wife’s and daughter’s lives.

Because he was so firmly woven into all that was important — his family, his work, the river, the miracle of a small blue planet spinning in the dark that needed blokes like him to show people how to preserve — that the missing pieces filled themselves in. He reckoned any bits that Jed hadn’t written on the pages would still be there, somehow, for those who read them.