In the shower, Emily turned so the water hit between the shoulder blades, almost knitting her together again. She asked herself whether she and Michael had made a terrible mistake going to bed at different times, never doing what she supposed better couples did, always rising with each other. From the start they had kept separate hours. A doctor specialising in sleep problems told them Michael suffered from delayed sleep phase disorder. It’s like you live in different time zones, said the doctor, different countries. Michael was prescribed melatonin and warned it might wear off in six months (it did). But if he and Emily had gone to bed at the same time, one of them reaching for the lamp at 10.30 pm, if they’d done this every night, then she wouldn’t have certain memories, Emily’s happiest, from those Saturdays when she rose early to jog her two-mile route, shutting the front door loudly when she came home, calling his name, then running into the bedroom and jumping onto the bed, stripping off her clothes, laughing.

3.

The restaurant franchise Emily proposed to write about was called Lucky’s. In fifty years, the franchise menu barely changed an item, the decor stayed as fixed as a photograph (the awnings yellow and gold, the floors chequerboard) and the opening hours were long and uniform across the chain. The franchise was named for its founder, Lucky Mallios, a Greek American who’d migrated to Sydney after the war. (In her research, Emily could not anywhere find an explanation of his nickname.) From America the restaurants took their diner-style interior, the novelties of the soda fountain and jukebox, the sundae and milkshake; from Britain they borrowed the greasy spoon menu of main dishes; from post-war Greece they obtained most of their staff. Lucky’s restaurants—also described as cafes—numbered forty-nine outlets at the peak of the business, but they had fallen out of style by the 1990s. What Emily would frame in her story as ‘the death of the franchise’ was a shooting in 1994: an incident commonly known as ‘the Third of April’, in which a gunman killed nine people inside the last Lucky’s restaurant in Sydney.

Liam wanted to run the piece in the annual food issue of the New Yorker, scheduled for the last week in May. ‘Would be great if you found a new angle on the shooting,’ he said. ‘I want to know what happened to the survivors. Focus on the long-term effects of the Third of April.’ One other thing, said Liam. He’d been booked to speak about the magazine at a Melbourne university in February. Why didn’t they plan to be in Australia at the same time, and he could pop up to Sydney for a short visit?

4.