‘Hi,’ I said. I knew instantly – from the way she backed up, the look on her face – that I’d made a mistake. ‘I think I found your wallet.’

I held it out to the mesh of the screen door. She waited for a moment before opening it.

‘Thank you.’

‘You can check,’ I said. ‘Everything’s there.’

I didn’t think she’d do it. But I stood and watched as she examined all her cards and counted the notes.

‘Thank you,’ the woman said again. She cleared her throat. ‘I hope you haven’t gone too far out of your way.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s nothing.’

I turned to go, but she said, ‘Hang on a second.’

She padded down the polished floorboards in her hallway, and came back holding a six-pack of beer that had two bottles missing. She handed it to me.

‘For your trouble,’ she said.

Maybe I should have had some pride and waved them away, but before I knew it the icy brown glass was pressing into my abdomen and I was holding them the way Curtis held those baby animals.

I opened one as soon as I got home. It wasn’t the type of beer that got thrown at us from car windows. It was good beer. It tasted of something more than the sour tang of alcohol. I drank the bottles one after another until all of them were gone.

Sometimes I think it’s inevitable that I will end up with Erica. If that happened I don’t know which of us would be more disappointed.

Maybe it’s better to be like Curtis, to believe that one day we’ll find a duffel bag full of cash and all our problems will vanish, the way a car vanishes when it turns its headlights off.

Perhaps that’s what they did, those kids who’d kept tearing up and down the highway that runs like an old scar down the centre of this island. Perhaps they turned the headlights off and that’s why things ended how they ended.

At least, I assumed it was them. It was the morning after I’d returned the wallet and still so dark and cold it may as well have been the middle of the night. We’d received our work order. A car had hit a truck, thrown two of its passengers, wrapped itself around a tree.

Had anyone survived? No-one knew.

On the way to the accident site, we stopped to clear a wallaby from the middle of the road. I turned the headlights down and kept the truck running while Curtis got out and knelt on the asphalt. He felt around inside the pouch. We didn’t make any jokes.

He dragged the wallaby to the side of the road. We do that to protect the scavengers – eagles, quolls, devils – that come to eat the dead and become roadkill in turn.