Dan said, ‘You’d think the last thing they’d want on the other side of the world would be to trade one shithole job for another. You’d think they’d want to try something new.’

‘Oh well, it was new all right – the heat and the parrots and the roos: that’s what Sheila used to write home about. But people did what they knew for a living. Cornish tin miners came to work the copper mines, Welsh sheep farmers came to run sheep stations, and folk from the industrial north sniffed out the muck and toil and noise.’

‘Hey, you’re losing your Aussie accent,’ he said, and she laughed and gave him a shove; then he said, ‘And what about you? You didn’t come for the tin or the sheep or the cars. Why did you come here, and stay for ever?’

She turned, and looked at him steadily. ‘Honestly? Because I felt completely safe in Adelaide.’

There was a beat of silence; then he said, ‘And why didn’t you feel safe in Sheffield?’ He was shocked. Hadn’t he made her feel safe? Hadn’t he been enough? Certainly she’d been enough for him. He’d had to rewrite his future when she left him, and that’s not easy when you’re eighteen and heartsick.

‘I wasn’t safe in Sheffield,’ she said. ‘I thought I could stay safe, but I couldn’t. I protected you from all the parts of my life I was ashamed of, and they were legion. I was steeped in shame and you didn’t know any of it.’ She glanced at him, saw his face, and said, ‘Oh, don’t be thinking you let me down somehow. Don’t think that for a moment. You were my refuge, you and your family, but in the end, I had to go. At least, I felt then that I had to go. I don’t know if it was the right thing to do, if the braver choice would’ve been to stay, but I ran away, and this is where you find me, still here.’

She was looking down now, her head too low for him to see her expression. He could see she was taking long, slow, steadying breaths. He took the half-finished glass of water from her hand and placed it on the floor; then he lifted the curtain of hair that hid her face and said, ‘Hey, look at me, darling.’