Until the horror year. The year Michelle’s husband Joe died and Will—sweet, kind, tough little Will, in training to be a childcare worker, for goodness sake!—went to prison. And Michelle, as though deliberately testing how much loss the human spirit could take, swept fourteen-year-old Lena away to live in Brisbane. And Nic had to let her go. No such thing as custody rights to your sister’s kid. No matter how destroyed you are by her absence.

She has her back now, though. A serious, fiery twenty-year-old so smart it amazes Nic that the girl would want to spend any time with a dullard like her at all. But she does! Miraculously, she really does seem to enjoy hanging with her old aunty, insisting, now that she is living in Sydney again, that they have lunch together every Sunday.

I should clear this room out, Nic thinks, pushing open the door, taking a cautious step inside. Tell her there’s always a bed for her here. It wouldn’t be so hard: the rag dolls and teddy bears and lions and puppies could move onto her own bed. The books—well, some of them could stay. It’d just be a matter of sorting through them, so only the most worthy remained. Only enough to fit neatly in the walnut-stained bookshelf, which is itself a beautiful, Lena-worthy thing currently hidden by all the non-Lena-worthy books stacked on and over and around it.

The clothes would be trickier to rehome. Some in plastic washing baskets, moving boxes and black garbage bags, others making multi-coloured soft statues or waterfalling off the furniture. Could she shift some of them to the living room? The lounge blankets wouldn’t mind the weight of clothing on them, surely. If she put only woollen jumpers and fleecy tracksuits out there it’d be like blankets for the blankets, wouldn’t it? But blankets don’t need to be blanketed. It would insult and offend and anyway, if they were gone, if the toys and the books and the clothes were gone, that would still leave the other things, the precious painful needed beautiful awful beloved things over there in the wardrobe in the corner, and what could she do with those that wouldn’t hurt them hurt her hurt hurt hurt—