“But I will get to meet her?”

Camille nods, her face drawn into a mysterious expression. “You will. I promise.”

We spend the next few hours fussing over Emma like two women who have lost their minds and can only focus on the tiny person that has been dropped into their midst. When it’s time to bring Emma back to her parents, I’m so exhausted, I let Camille go on her own.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Ben arrives on Friday evening and even though I’ve seen countless pictures of him, when I meet him in the flesh he strikes me as even more of a golden boy. A young man so sure of himself, the fact that his mother has brought another woman into the house where he grew up doesn’t seem to faze him in the slightest. When he greets me for the first time with a handshake too firm for a nineteen-year-old, a slick, confident smile on his face, and the allure of a teen movie star who just walked the red carpet, I can only think I’m meeting a politician in the making.

He’s very affectionate with his mother, seems to adore her, and his effortless way with her, and as a consequence with me, puts me at ease. I’m beginning to think Camille’s children are of the rare enlightened ilk that truly takes no offense to their mother suddenly deciding to date a woman. Or perhaps they have too much going on in their own lives to spend much time obsessing over it. Flo with her newborn baby and Ben with the new chapter of his life at university.

I must conclude that Camille has been an excellent mother who has brought up her children in exemplary fashion—how else can the courteousness, confidence and utter lack of animosity in the two young people I’ve met this week be explained? And perhaps their father is a much more decent bloke than his philandering would suggest.

As the time for brunch approaches I can’t help but think how strange it is to be dropped into these people’s lives. These people I could so easily never have known. When Camille takes me to the market around the corner on Saturday morning to buy food, reassuring me that we will find everything we need for the brunch right there, and we drag an old-fashioned shopping trolley behind us that we fill up as we make our way from stall to stall, I stop and think about what I’d be doing if the smoke detector batteries in the rental apartment hadn’t died when they did.

I’d be visiting my parents in Perth. I’d finally be putting the house on the market and looking for a new place to live—somewhere to start my life over. I’d have planned a trip somewhere warm to escape the cold Sydney winter.