Avril picks at her sandwich for a while, disassembling it, discarding rings of onion, bits of cucumber, lettuce, crusts. Finally she looks up at Laura.

Do you think it’s ever possible to do that? Just leave things behind?

What kind of things?

Avril shrugs. Bad things.

Laura watches Avril cleaning her fingers, one by one, with antiseptic wipes.

After a moment, Avril looks up, and, flushing, seems to cast about for other words. I just mean … Like you said, Meggie couldn’t completely break away. The way she spoke … it was the language of a man who killed her little dog and thought girls were nothing.

Mmm. Laura frowns, pauses. But it was her mother’s, too, I guess. And her sister’s, and Clementina’s.

Avril nods. I wonder when Dr Nguyen’s due.

Well, sweetie, I’m just going to sit with Cooper a little while longer and then go. Laura stands and kisses the top of Avril’s head. I’ll let you know when I’m leaving.

She turns back at the door of the lounge, torn between wanting to remind Avril—again—to eat and a reluctance to bully her. The dissected sandwich has been pushed aside and Avril is frowning at her hands, scrubbing her palms. She looks up.

Laura? I’ve been reading Meggie’s story aloud to Coop.

A shiver runs through Laura. A gust from the North Sea.

Gut feeling again. But I think, I’ve just got this feeling, he’s been listening.

22

Avril

Sun is breaking through cloud here and there above the eucalypts. Avril tips her face up to it, and too bad about the UVs. It’s too weak to worry about, she thinks, knowing it isn’t true; that for her, the sun is never too weak to redden her skin and raise those small shiny spots that itch and burn. But she’ll take her chances in return for a blue sky today.

She squints into it, and the clouds become a map of the safe world, the world Before. Her home, the herb garden, the fruit trees arcing round the house. The road stretching west into the village, with its pizza store, deli, fruit and veg market. Five k’s in the other direction, halfway down the hillside, her mother-in-law’s rustic house, Laura and her butterflies. The arterial road that connects suburbs in the hills and winds down to the city, branching off at the foothills hub: cinema, shopping centres, banks, post office, the fire station where Coop works.

Where Coop used to work.

She pinches the space between her eyes, blinks and the safe world disappears.

A car at the top of the drive. Familiar grey sedan. Oh no.

She dashes into the studio and flicks over the pages of her appointment book. There it is, a hurried pencil scrawl. Ewan, 11.30. And she’s forgotten to call him.