The house had grown dark by this stage, and, while Astra was in the bathroom, I sat at the table alone, looking around at the room. I was trying to work how to raise the topic of Astra’s psychic powers. Was that really what my father had said? What had she foreseen? Faced with the reality of this woman now, that story seemed fairly dubious.

From the bathroom, I heard the toilet flush. But Astra didn’t return. I looked again at the room around me and seemed to discern an aura of loneliness and dishevelment that I hadn’t detected earlier, a chaos that had been hurriedly smoothed flat in the hours or minutes before I arrived. Suddenly, I knew that Tess wasn’t coming back, that she didn’t live here anymore.

When Astra finally emerged, she went into the kitchen and stood with her back to the fridge. She looked different, somehow, but I couldn’t have said why.

‘What was I saying?’ she asked.

I looked at my notes. The word ‘Mike’ was underlined three times.

‘Someone called Mike?’

‘Was I?’ She seemed confused. ‘Yeah. Okay. I don’t know what happened to him, though I guess I could probably find out.’

She was still for a while but then she turned to face the window and placed her palms down on the stone bench. I waited. A moth fizzed off my head like a rubber band.

‘I have this vision, actually,’ she said at last. ‘I’m on the freeway with your dad. The Tullamarine freeway. It’s late at night. He’s doing wheelies. Burnouts, whatever they’re called, going round and round.’

‘Donuts?’ I said. ‘What year would this have been?’

‘I remember all that smoke,’ she continued. ‘I’m surprised I’m still here.’ She closed her eyes. ‘Mike was there, too,’ she said. Then she opened her eyes again, although she remained where she was, as if afraid to move. ‘I can see him standing there as we go round,’ she said. ‘Your dad’s driving, I’ve got my head out the window. I’m screaming. And Mike’s standing on the concrete embankment in the middle of the highway. He must have been filming it. He was a filmmaker. Did I say that?’

Just then there was a noise, and we both turned towards the doorway and saw a person who was almost certainly Tess walk into the room. She was a short, muscular woman, in her sixties, I assumed, and she was still wearing a bike helmet with a flashing red light.

There was a moment’s pause before I spoke to introduce myself, as if the very atoms of the room were rearranging themselves, settling into a new configuration. Something ebbed away. Just a few moments earlier, as far as I was concerned, Tess had been as good as dead.

‘That’s right,’ Tess said, extending her hand. ‘I forgot you were coming.’