Lena’s mum kept track of housing prices in Leichhardt. Every time there was an increase it’d spark another skirmish between the sisters. It was hard not to take Mum’s side on this one. By the time they were in their teens, selling the house would have brought ten times the money paid for it in the eighties. Still not enough for them each to have bought a house in Sydney, but a sizeable deposit on an apartment in the outer suburbs maybe.

But Nic held firm. The Family Home was hers to preserve.

The thing was, Mum wouldn’t have sold it either if it had been her name on the title. She would’ve proudly taken on the mantle of Protector of the Family Home. Would have done a good job with it, too, killer housekeeper that she was. Used to drive Lena crazy, the need to iron everything—even tea towels and pillowcases, for fuck’s sake! The way she’d tut and redo the vacuuming if Lena hadn’t taken care to do it in straight rows working with the nap of the carpet. If there were streak marks on the windows, on the mopped floors, they’d have to be redone, too. Every shitty rented flat or house they’d ever lived in had perfectly hemmed curtains on the windows, a precisely pressed tablecloth on the table, matching cushions on the couch.

If Mum had inherited Nan’s house they wouldn’t have had to pay rent all that time Dad was sick off work and Will might not have resorted to selling weed. Which would have meant no prison, no move to Queensland. Lena’s interstate uni escape plan would have taken her to Melbourne or Adelaide. She would never have met Josh, never had the correct rating for her imperfect arse become the subject of heated internet discussion threads. The Leichhardt house would be a clean, safe place to return to in uni breaks instead of the stinking, filthy site of her aunty’s recent near death.

When Mum got angry about the house she believed should have been theirs, the unfairness of it all, Dad would remind her that people who dwelt on the past were scared of the future. He said the same thing whenever Lena or Will asked about his childhood and family, or about Mum’s dad or brother.

We don’t dwell on the past in this family, he’d say. We’re too excited about the golden future.

How do you know the future will be golden? Lena would ask, knowing his answer, loving to hear it.

With you in it? How could it be anything else?

It was a spell he cast. Turned the past into a dark fairy tale they need never relive. Why would they when they had made it through to the happily ever after, unscarred and unscathed?