It was more than Lena had. She wore everything on the outside. Needed you to know when she was hurt and when she was sad and when she was angry, when she’d done well on a test and when the nurse complimented her on helping her aunty. It was like that goddamn scar; she wore it like it was something she’d done on purpose, like it meant something. Like gang colours or a prison tatt. She never considered that keeping things to yourself was not about shame and hiding; it was about not thrusting all your shit in someone else’s face because everybody’s got shit to deal with. Have some dignity, he wanted to tell her. Have some pride.

That’s what he’d tried to do when he got sentenced. Maybe he’d done it too well, though. Made Aunty Nic think he didn’t need her. Maybe that was why she didn’t come.

But actually, given the hysterical—it was—howling coming from the bedroom right now, maybe Mum had been right all along. Nic couldn’t handle hard stuff. Wasn’t tough like the rest of the family. Wasn’t good of heart or strong of spirit, either. Maybe she had shown her true colours when he’d been locked up. He should’ve told Lena about that. Saved her from wasting her week and breaking her heart over the mad, selfish cow.

THREE

NIC

NIC

She has survived worse betrayals, she tells herself, but that’s self-comforting bullshit. This is beyond anything. Much worse than when she found out that Tony had been getting blow jobs from a woman he worked the closing shift at Maccas with. Coming to pick Nic up, all tired and stinking of lard and her not knowing for months that his dick was coated in some middle-aged desperado’s dried spit. Worse than the feeling that time at work, the big staff meeting to say that Samantha—Nic’s best mate in the place—had been pilfering from the till and from staff lockers for years. Worse—and she would have until this day said nothing could be worse but here it was—worse worse worse than when Michelle had upped and moved to Brisbane and taken Lena. It was like having a piece of herself wrenched off and her not allowed to be angry or even sad because how pathetic would that be—crying like a bereaved mother just because your niece has moved interstate?