You are going straight to hell, Ruby Ryan, I chastised myself. But, at least by going on a cruise with my sister first, I’d be taking the scenic route.

6

In our post-summer post-mortem, when we were scrubbing the metaphorical blood out of the shag pile, Emerald also confessed to me what really happened after our lunch at the Convict Cafe that day . . .

Sliding into bed beside her dozing husband, all Emerald craved was some carnal comfort. Alessandro’s tousled mass of curly hair on the pillow was nearly as dark as when they’d first met, with just the odd fleck of grey at his temples. Daily gym workouts meant that he still sported the whole Greek god look – the man looked seriously underdressed without a plinth.

She played with him gently, rubbing her nipples up against his chest while trying to forget her shitty day. After her poor little sister’s cancer confirmation, Emerald had dashed back to work to deal with a kangaroo that had been hit by a car in the national park. It had been lying on her table, concussed, when all of a sudden it leapt up off the slab and jumped around the surgery, smashing up everything in its path. Shelves of fish food and chew toys and dog toothpaste all went flying, including a glass tank that contained a cantankerous brown snake. Emerald was torn between catching the venomous viper or tackling the roo before it bounded onto the busy road.

In the midst of the chaos, Emerald’s mother rang to say she needed her daughter urgently. Once the roo was corralled, Emerald had to leave her nurse to catch the snake, clean up the wreckage and cancel her cat hernia op as she sped to her mother’s house – only to discover that the ‘emergency’ was Ruth’s inability to work her Netflix account. Emerald was then dragooned into going through the mail, paying the bills online, untangling the pool sweep, weeding the flower bed, cooking her mother’s dinner then watching ‘a bit of telly’, which turned out to be an episode of Midsomer Murders – that was two hours of Emerald’s life she’d never get back again – only to be informed by her mother that if she dared to go on that cruise with Ruby, Ruth would change her will to leave everything to the Catholic Church.