That day in the Lucky’s restaurant, two chefs tried to fight off the shooter, Henry Matfield, and he shot them both dead. Customers hid under tables, but Matfield found them. There was one survivor—a waitress, Sophia—and she later wrote a first-person account of the massacre, published in the local suburban paper, the Inner-West Courier. The restaurant’s manager and proprietor, Lucky Mallios, wasn’t present; he was sixty-seven at the time and rarely worked a full day anymore. While the shooting took place he was at home watching Wheel of Fortune. This fact, Emily noticed, found its way into several contemporaneous news reports of the Third of April, as if the gameshow detail revealed something important about Lucky.

Henry Matfield was discovered three days after the shooting: hikers came across his body in a national park on the south coast. By the time the state coroner ruled Matfield’s death a suicide several weeks later, Lucky Mallios had closed his final cafe. A chain of discount pharmacies later purchased the building.

5.

Lucky had seemed pleased to hear from Emily when she’d called him from London. He came across as excited, moved—relieved, even—and said he’d be happy as hell to help with a story for the New Yorker. ‘Most people have something to hide,’ he claimed, ‘but not me, not anymore’. He was at last ready to spill his guts, as he put it. Lucky’s abundantly energetic voice was a mid-Pacific mixture of a kind Emily had never heard before—the American accent after fifty years in Australia. He’d been easy to find: the online White Pages listed his number. The company that bought into the franchise was also listed in the yellow pages. These two contacts would lead to others, Emily supposed, and through them she’d discover the piece she wanted to write, since even the most closely crafted pitch was only a good guess at the final product. She could no better imagine the story than she could, at this point, imagine her own future, guessing where she would live, if she would be alone for the rest of her life, if she would grow bitter and cruel like the people she avoided. Just as well, she thought: dwelling on the future would be like walking into quicksand.

After her shower, Emily decided, what would make her feel better was to hire a small car and get to work. ‘Shall we meet this Lucky?’ she said to herself. Shall we secure his trust? Shall we pretend that Michael isn’t in love with someone called Therese? She hated that name now: it seemed fine before, homely even, but now she hated it on a deeply personal level. ‘What the fuck, Michael?’ Emily said loudly. ‘What the fuck?’