‘We can make it work with her at home,’ she went on. ‘I’ll manage the invoices, I’ll help.’

She knew it was hard on Jared. There was only so much she could do over the phone and by email. He was the one in Sydney, living closest to their mother (although he wasn’t close enough to make the visits easy). She could tell he was unconvinced but he gave her the dates of his holiday, and she agreed to stay with Helen in his absence.

‘Got it,’ she said. ‘I’ll look at flights.’

She called the real estate agent next. ‘We have a Fox Situation,’ she said, emphasising the words. The animals were getting to be a problem, what with the holes they dug everywhere. Her son could fall and hurt himself. Anybody could.

‘It’s also the poo,’ she said. The Poo Situation. ‘You have to play hopscotch to miss them.’

‘The foxes?’

‘No, the poos.’

‘Ah, I see. Sounds like we’d better have a look.’

When she hung up, the cubs were still revelling in the sun, snapping at blades of grass. Ronnie watched in wonder, mesmerised, until she told him, ‘Okay, mister, time for your play date at the park.’

As she packed his bag, Nina felt a little guilty. With her call to the agent, she had set things in motion – there would now be a process, perhaps involving the council and men wearing dungarees. Or so she thought until the agent called her back the next day. Apparently the landlady wanted to be humane. Had Nina tried securing the rubbish bin and not leaving food about?

Nina was curt in response. She insisted on action. Afterwards, she told her husband she was going to have to be the baddie, the one putting her foot down. ‘I’ve had my share of appalling landlords but this woman takes the cake. We can’t be expected to run a sanctuary in the garden.’

The thing with the foxes was one more thing to sort out before their trip. The other things included work things, Ronnie’s childcare hiatus, and plans for how to get from the airport in Sydney to her mother’s house two hours south. She crowd-sourced distractions for Ronnie for the plane, putting the call out in a Facebook post.

Other things, so many things. She received a recommendation for a grief counsellor and hoped to squeeze in a session. It had been six months since her father had died, but she’d barely had time to grieve. Grieve: put that on the to-do list with everything else!