Erin and I had dressed and left the chalet without talking much; the space between us had the awkward air of long-time friends who’d slept together. After last night’s confessions and her invitation, we weren’t sure what to say. I’d slept in the oven mitt, and now it was half bio-material. I couldn’t take it off if I wanted to. I’d had to force it, seams straining, through my thermals. Seeing my one-handed struggle, Erin had helped me pull a beanie down over my ears. Yesterday I’d seemed to find myself in the cold more often than my crackling-fireplace wardrobe allowed for, so I was determined to be prepared. I chewed a single glove down my good wrist until it slid over my fingers. As we left, I grabbed an iron, fossicked from one of the chalet’s back cupboards. Erin had raised an eyebrow when I’d picked it up, but I saw her question rise in her chest and give up halfway, no doubt deciding she didn’t care to know.

I had the loupe in my pocket. I’d woken before Erin and had examined it in the morning light. It had 50x written on the side, which I assumed was the magnification. I’d fetched a fifty-dollar note from the stash and held it aloft, looking through the eyepiece for anything interesting.

There was one thing I knew about Australian fifty-dollar bills, and that was thanks to an old party trick that comes in handy for writers. In 2018, the yellow fifty-dollar banknote was redesigned to include a miniature reprinting of Edith Cowan’s inaugural speech to parliament underneath her portrait. Unfortunately, it featured a misspelling of the word ‘responsibility’, which had gone unnoticed for six months, after millions of bills were already in circulation. It was an easy dinner party anecdote: I’d ask around for fifties and, upon spotting one of the misspelled ones, launch into the story, climaxing with the glass-chinking exclamation that ‘It’s proof they don’t pay us writers enough – we would have found the error much faster if we’d seen a few more of these!’ Cue raucous laughter. But that was the extent of my knowledge of currency. Examining the bill, I could see it did have the typo in it, which suggested the money was more likely real than fake in any case.

There was indeed a serial number, as I’d guessed, as well as intersecting dashes of colour and a small hologram on the bottom left. But all of those features, including the typo, were visible to the naked eye. The loupe wasn’t necessary. The 50x magnification was strong enough to show me the very seam of the plastic, the bleed of the different colours of ink. The loupe was to see something else. I gave up. Looking was pointless if I didn’t know what I was looking for.