It can be the little things that save you. His phone buzzed as he ambled past the grain-handlers on Hallett Street. Wendy: Pancakes 9 am. Hirsch walked home with a bounce, and it didn’t matter that Sergeant Brandl texted him a few minutes later: briefing 11 sharp. Love and work, the twin poles of his existence. He returned to the police station, showered and changed for his pancake breakfast, and headed out of town.

Half an hour later he was seeing a side of Wendy he hadn’t really encountered before, and finding he rather liked it.

She was venting about her brother and sister-in-law. ‘Because Rose sees herself as vague and passive, she lets Matt make all the decisions.’

‘Self-fulfilling,’ Hirsch said.

‘Exactly.’

They were in deckchairs on her side veranda, a little table between them, cluttered with the dregs of their breakfast. Katie was a few metres away, rocking in her hammock, reading, listening.

‘Honestly, the family dynamics in that house,’ Wendy said, looking down, shaking her head. ‘Just as well you didn’t come with us.’ She lifted her head again. ‘And they never eat the food I bring. I don’t know why I bother.’

Hirsch reached out to lay a calming hand on her clenched fist. She turned to him, frustrated, and her eyes were damp. ‘Sorry.’

He smiled. It was good just to sit on the veranda with her. And he liked a good rant if it was intelligent and amusing.

Wendy continued to deliver. ‘Lunch was quite weird. Almost no conversation, they all just sat hunched over their plates, shovelling in the food. Peculiar. They never used to be as bad.’

‘They sound like prisoners in a dining hall,’ Hirsch said.

She gave him an intrigued look. ‘And after lunch they all retired to a different part of the house and played with their fucking devices. Sorry, sweetheart.’

Katie’s piping voice: ‘That’s okay, Mummy.’ Pause. ‘Tell him about Easter.’

‘God, Easter,’ Wendy said. ‘We went to their place as usual and there was an Easter egg hunt—the idea being everyone shared afterwards, right? But those kids—they just guarded their hoards like sticky-fingered little dragons and refused to share with my dear, sweet, wise, gracious daughter.’

‘Tell him about the money,’ Katie said.

Wendy closed and opened her eyes and shot Hirsch a rueful look. ‘Do you want to know?’

‘Give me all the dirt,’ Hirsch said. The shoals and setbacks of ordinary life were mostly ridiculous, even funny. Definitely preferable to bloodshed.

‘A year ago, I lent Matt seven hundred and fifty dollars—which was fine, he lent me money when Glen died, and I paid it all back. But yesterday he gives me six hundred and fifty dollars, as if the loan was settled. I didn’t say anything. Now I don’t think I can. It’s only a hundred, but, you know, it’s…’

‘Symptomatic?’