Lucky and Valia fell for each other a second time. They reconciled, they began a new relationship, but ran out of days. They started again too late. In October, she called him at the restaurant to say she had stage IV pancreatic cancer, diagnosed three months ago, and she’d recently stopped a course of chemotherapy. Lucky understood she was calling to say goodbye, but he didn’t accept this conversation as a farewell: he asked if she were available to meet the next day. Valia said she was. He asked if she could leave the house. She definitely could. Valia gave him an address, and the next morning he took the day off and drove to her home in Ryde. All this time, forty years, he’d wondered where she lived in Sydney. Valia met him at the door in sneakers and straw hat, ready to go out. She didn’t feel fantastic, she said, but not terrible either. Today would be a slow walk to a nearby park.

‘You look better than me,’ said Lucky, not yet knowing what to say.

Her house, half brick and half siding, with steep gabling of varying angles, ran back to a point where Lucky could make out a grapevine trellis and an olive tree beyond, reminding him of the Achillion’s backyard. As a result he couldn’t much associate the place with Robert, her late husband. Lucky had seen Robert’s death notice in 1987 but, with painful determination, he didn’t contact Valia to offer condolences, presuming they wouldn’t be welcome, conceding his motivation was not entirely pure. On the walk they avoided their shared history and spoke about what Lucky considered neutral topics—food, movies, his impending holiday in Greece, her trip the previous year to the Northern Territory—and there was such a strong sense of ease between them that he assumed Valia would ask him inside once they returned to her house. Their faces, their words, their every projection had about them the same sense of surprised reciprocity. After talking for thirty minutes, Lucky knew he could spend all the remaining days of his life with her.

Here was this thing he had kept; at last it could be used.

They would go inside, thought Lucky, and go to bed. They might not make love; it didn’t matter. It would mean everything to lie down next to Valia again. But on the footpath outside her home, while he was looking up at her front door, he stepped in newly laid dog shit. The black stink of the turd passed through his heart. Valia, her cheeks shaking with laughter, removed her broad hat (her hair remained unaffected by the treatment) and she watched while he scraped off his shoe in the gutter.

‘Can you believe that happened?’ he said.

‘Come back tomorrow,’ said Valia. ‘If I feel a little better, we’ll have something to eat.’

‘We’ll go to your favourite restaurant.’