After an hour of sodden stomping they saw ghostly figures beckoning them through the dense cloud. Highland snow gums, colour-swirled and hardy, and alpine yellow gums, splashed with shades of lemon and olive. Skeletal in the mist. When they reached them, they saw fluorescent pink tags hanging from the twisting artwork of their branches. Orange bike lights hammered into dolerite boulders, beneath flakes of minty lichen. They dragged themselves along this trail, exhausted and numb, back to their car, where they cranked the heater, chipped off their frozen socks and drove back to the city to meet their quiet, fumble-mouthed father.

Beer fell down their throats. They stretched their calves. Ned was thinking of their uncle Bill, and the time he’d climbed his own mountain, flailed through his own snow. He was about to tell his daughters the story, then realised that he still didn’t know which version was true. Had Bill outmuscled and rescued a raging ram, or had he failed to save a wounded, weakened one? Ned had never found out. He couldn’t start the tale without knowing the ending. He closed his mouth. Felt the raw throb he always did whenever he thought of Bill.

He also felt an angered itch. He wanted to tell his daughters how foolish they’d been. How close they’d come to a blackened foot, a sawn-off nose. Didn’t they know what a bit of time in the snow could do to flesh? He thought he’d raised smarter girls, he wanted to say. But he couldn’t say any of it, because he hadn’t come to this freezing concrete port to tell them off. He needed to tell them about their mother.

But now they were warmed through, now the beer had got to work, and they wanted to talk about their lives on campus, their studies. The things they’d learned that had tilted and swollen their understanding of the world. Things their sheltered rural father needed to hear. Sally talking, Grace nodding.

The golden mean. Bundle pricing. The Charge of the Light Brigade. Supply and demand. The Bay of Pigs. The sunk-cost fallacy. Did he know about these things? Had these concepts and moments reached him on the orchard, in the forests, on the sheep stations, in the stockyards?

In this torrent of talk he could only smile, raise his eyebrows and say, oh, is that so; well, I’ll be; this is all new to me. He wasn’t offended, despite their youthful arrogance—he was too pleased to see how much his daughters were enjoying their learning.

The only problem in all this history, ethics and economics was that it left no room to speak about Callie. There was no opportunity for him to tell them that the cancer was back: maybe stronger than before, maybe not—it was too early to tell.