Meghan was a great PA and she was learning, and Sal loved to promote women in the workplace and pass on some of what she’d learned, but also, Meghan was a fucking idiot. ‘Your brother’s about to kill himself.’ Was that a way you began a conversation with someone listening? Was that a way to break the news? At least she’d seemed to sense she’d messed up. Sal had gone wordlessly past her, out into the laneway to call home, ignoring Meghan’s half-question; Meghan had flinched as if someone had slapped her. Sal was angry enough that she could have slapped her.

The day was hot, the chrome and glass twinkling like the ocean in the sun. The city was exactly as it should be. The city that was her home now. Growing up, Sal had often read books where the heroine ran away to become queen of an animal kingdom, or was adopted by mermaids. In adult life she had found that alternative universe, here, the reverse side of the world. She’d refused to play the game her schoolfriends wandered into, the two kids and stolid relationships, the soft-play and date nights ‘to keep the spark’, a world that stretched no further in any direction than the week in Majorca every August. She had made up a different game and played it like a pro. Her teenage self would have rubbed her eyes in joy to see 2019 Sally. Right down to the way she’d chopped off those last two letters.

That was how she would have summarized her existence, in total, if asked to do a self-assessment even an hour ago. And yet now, standing in an alley under a blue-purple mural of Jimi Hendrix, surrounded by the high spirits and profitable activity of others, she was being asked to believe that James was threatening suicide, or conceivably had even done it already, and she could not even get him, her brother, on the phone.

No. He couldn’t. He couldn’t have done anything. This could still be fixed, and would be fixed, by Sal.

‘The person was not available.’ Christ. This was such an irresponsible thing to do. It wasn’t like James, not the James she knew. Used to know. They used to text nearly every day, when she first started living in Australia. ‘It doesn’t have to be a big deal, the distance, not with a phone,’ she’d said, when he almost – almost – made her cry by surprisingly showing up to see her off at Heathrow. (She held back and had a short sob hours later, when she was safely over Uzbekistan.) They’d met up any time she came back to the UK to see Mum or look for wedding venues.