She folded her arms, pondered for a while, then said, ‘I’ll need to go back to Adelaide soon. Face the music, come to some arrangement with Michael.’

‘I’ll come with you when you go.’ No way was he letting McCormack back in. He’d fight to the death if he had to.

‘I need to see Tahnee and her crew, too, catch her between gigs somewhere.’

He nodded. He knew all about the prodigious talent that was Tahnee Jackson. ‘I’ll come with you when you do that too,’ he said. ‘Wherever you go, there I’ll be.’

‘Fine by me,’ she said.

‘We should take Peter along,’ Dan said. ‘Mind you, he’d need a passport first. And he’d have to be drugged and blindfolded.’

Ali laughed. ‘I wonder if he could be coaxed on to the aeroplane though? I’d love to show him Adelaide.’ It would transform his existence, she thought: jacaranda season, evenings on the beach, the sun warming his bones.

She drained her half of Guinness and thought about how sometimes – and right now – anything and everything seemed possible and happiness buzzed through her like electricity down a wire, then other times her certainties seemed riddled with fault lines. She’d fixed herself up with a new phone, a very necessary move, but the floodgates were open once again to emails, phone calls, texts, and there were days Ali wished she could just fling it into the River Don. Meanwhile Dan’s phone rang nine or ten times a day, and it was usually Katelin, and he was always calm and steady when he spoke to her, whatever she accused him of, however much she raged. He knew he was at fault here; he knew he couldn’t say, as Alison could to Michael, that in the end Katelin had made him unhappy. It was just he belonged with Alison, and always had.

Dan went to the bar for two more, and while he was gone, Ali’s phone chimed with an incoming email, which she opened, then wished she hadn’t. Michael, writing to her from the future. It was tomorrow morning in Adelaide, but still pre-dawn, only 3.12 a.m. – a telling fact, which wasn’t lost on her.

Sleeping beside you these past few months, I had no idea how far from me you really were, so by the time you decided to leave, I had no hope at all of reaching you. I know you believe I lack imagination, and perhaps I do, imagination is rarely required in my world. But my feelings for you are as deep as they are true, and I hope you’ll look closely into your own heart, and then, if you need to, look closer still, and finally know that what you want, and what you need, is what you already had.