‘Give it time,’ said Nancy easily. ‘It can take months to get over glandular fever. As long as she doesn’t push it.’

‘I think she knows that.’ Intellectually, at any rate. Jed could still hear the tension, the touch of desperation in her adopted sister’s voice in their nightly phone calls.

She was vaguely aware of Nancy’s steps down the corridor, her greeting to Moira, her sister-in-law, now working at the new Ben Clancy Rehabilitation wing of the hospital, then the sound of her ute in the car park. An hour later she looked up from her notes, shocked by how much time had fallen into the black hole where writing novels dwelled.

Black? No, golden, more bright than reality, its colours more vivid because if they weren’t, the copies you managed to get onto the page would be too pale to be read. She shoved her notebook into her bag, took Sam’s hand and kissed him on the lips. ‘Good night, darling.’

His ute waited for her in the car park. She tried to drive it at least twice a week, whenever Blue was babysitting Mattie. It would be terrible if Sam woke and his ute had been neglected . . .

She stopped, her hand on the hot steering wheel. If Sam woke, there’d be no miraculous getting out of bed and striding outside to drive away. If Sam woke, it might be to partial or total paralysis, even brain damage so severe he might never recognise her . . .

If. She had to learn to accept ‘if’. Jed Kelly had fought for survival, mental and physical, every day of her life until she had come to Gibber’s Creek. It was hard to learn to accept, not fight, to live with ‘if’, not strive for ‘when’. To accept the beauty of each day.

And it had been beautiful, sitting with the woman who was her foster mother in both their hearts, even if neither had ever used the phrase, listening to stories of the past, knowing Sam was beside her.

‘I know your name now. It’s Darling,’ he had said, the last words before he died and was resuscitated. And Jed, whose non-specific religious beliefs had survived even Matilda’s weekly church attendance, and Sam’s assumption that of course they would be married in church, suddenly felt that Sam McAlpine had not been given this extension of life for no reason, even if it were only to give his wife time to accept and say goodbye.

The tussocked hills were feathered gold, the sky bleached by heat, even in autumn, the river there shrunk to a glaze of water over the sand, patched green with algae. Matilda had said the river was only ankle deep in the long Federation drought. It was already dryer than that after two years, though now, of course, far more humans, their crops and stock used its water. Jed had been very, very careful with the rainwater in their tanks. Maybe tomorrow though she’d have a really long shower with town water at the Blue Belle, though even Gibber’s Creek’s water supply was murky, and so heavy with chlorine it had turned Mrs Zabrinsky’s bleached hair green.