‘Just . . . just everything. This is the start of everything, isn’t it? Not just marriage, but my job, where I live and how I live . . .’

Jed smiled. ‘They don’t issue you with a padlock and chain during the marriage service, or not last time I went to one. You are allowed to change. You will change. You have changed. We all do.’

‘But I won’t change about this,’ said Scarlett softly, looking at herself again in the mirror. Yes, she was beautiful, she decided. She was even normal beautiful, not elf beautiful, even if that distinction only mattered to her. ‘Somehow I think this . . . this is forever. Whatever I do today is the path I’ll walk for the rest of my life even if there are twists along the way.’

‘Every day is the beginning of the rest of your life. Though I wouldn’t use that cliché in a book.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Actually, I do. You want my opinion?’

‘Yes,’ said Scarlett desperately.

‘Bit late to ask me now. But I think you’ve made the right choice. More than that. I know you have.’

‘Really?’

‘Yep. Scarlett, darling, do you really think I wouldn’t have said something if I’d thought you were making a mistake? You’re not making a mistake. This is right’.

‘This is right,’ echoed Scarlett.

Green hills, olive green, gum-tree green, which was the right colour green. She had not known how much she needed the greens of home, the depth of blue sky, the hush of the bush at midday when a cloud across the sun briefly stilled the cicadas’ shrieking, until she had come back to them.

This was right.

‘This is right,’ she reassured herself again as Jim’s black latest-model Mercedes, gladly lent for the occasion — as long as no one marred its finish with Just Married scrawled in shaving cream or tied tin cans to the bumper bar or broke the sump on a rut — pulled out of Dribble’s driveway.

There’d been some . . . discussion . . . about who’d give her away. Michael had assumed he would, as her foster father. Sam thought that being the male of the household she’d called her home gave him rights as well. Jed announced that men giving women away was outmoded patriarchy and there was no reason why an adopted sister shouldn’t give the bride away instead. And Scarlett then pointed out she had been independent for years and so didn’t need giving away at all . . .

They’d settled on Michael. It would have hurt him to be left out.

The car purred down the road, luxuriously ostentatious. Jed drove, Mattie beside her in the front, Michael in the back beside Scarlett, her skirts spread wide. She could not speak. She looked out of the window instead.