Thea was home from Melbourne for the long summer vacation so the family was complete again and Beatriz was content, except, when they gathered to eat, or chat, or read in the garden, under the hibiscus shade of the long wooden pergola, they were often only four because inside, upstairs, lovely Stella was keeping to herself, inert on her bed, her face pale and doll-like against the fresh white pillow. She was no longer pregnant. At Sheila and Dora’s house in Quorn, the very day after telling Ali in a flood of tears that, after all, she wasn’t ready to be a mother, the girl had miscarried, as if her body had decided to spare her the cycle of tormented indecision and take matters into its own hands. It was extraordinary how efficient the process had been, how swift and thorough. Ninety minutes it had taken, and a whole heap of Sheila and Dora’s Turkish hammam towels. The shock to them all had been immense – all that blood, and the brief but searing bouts of pain, and home being so far away, and then, afterwards, the acres and acres of guilt at the terrible, quiet relief. Later the same day, Stella had been checked over by a nurse with a brisk, no-nonsense air and expert hands, which Ali watched closely as they moved over her daughter’s abdomen and inside her body, pressing, assessing. And all the while she talked, about nature’s ways and the cast-iron reasons behind just about everything that happens in life.

‘You’ve slipped it for a reason, sweetheart,’ she said. ‘You grow up on a farm, you soon understand that a mare slips a foal, a sheep slips a lamb, there’s always a why and a wherefore.’ Stella didn’t respond. She lay on the gurney, with her eyes closed, but when Ali’s hand squeezed hers, she’d squeezed back. ‘Right-oh,’ said the nurse, gathering her tools. ‘A scrape and a polish, and you’ll be good to go.’

‘That would’ve been Brianna,’ Dora said when Ali recounted the story later. ‘Bedside manners of the bush, but she knows what she’s at. Stella’s going to be fine.’

And she was, but somehow she wasn’t. She was less Stella-like, a listless, thoughtful, much quieter version of herself. Beatriz said give her time, but Michael, a solution-finder, a fixer of problems, believed a family trip up to Burra was what was needed – just the four of them, because Beatriz hated going bush; a few weeks at Lismore Creek, just like the old days, when the girls were little and all summer could be spent swinging on the gates in the shearing shed and riding ponies alongside the stockmen and their horses.

‘But it’s years since we were all there together,’ Ali said, now, to her husband.

‘Exactly my point.’

‘Do we want to be inland, in the heat?’