Her bus finally arrived and she got on, finding a spot at the back the way she always did. It had started to drizzle and she looked out over the wet Sydney streets and the way the lights of the traffic and billboards reflected in the small puddles left everywhere. At one point, she’d contemplated leaving, getting a fresh start somewhere else, in another country, where she would never run into anyone from her past, would never need to be confronted with it ever again, until she realized that hoping for no confrontation, for no comeuppance was ridiculous, because all those feelings lay within her. She would always see herself when she looked into the mirror, no matter how much she had changed and tried to do right by others, tried to make up with good deeds for the bad ones she had committed, as if it was a simple credit-debit balance that needed to be evened out. She would always be the person who had said and done those things—and now Louise Hamilton had turned up to remind her of that.

What did she think anyway? That she could progress through her life without ever meeting any of the girls she had called the most ghastly things? Mia had always known that life was not that kind of fairytale, and now she had the proof. She would find a way to deal with Louise, with that side of her past, of herself, and live with it in a more aware way than she had been doing. It was the only way.

“Is everything all right?” Jo asked. “You seem a bit flighty today. And if you look at that door one more time, I’m afraid it might come off its hinges just from the sheer intensity of your stare.”

Mia was dreading the moment Amber and Lou would walk in. And she was sure she looked a lot worse for wear. She hadn’t slept a wink, kept tossing and turning in bed, trying to come up with ways to make things better. Things were already better for Lou—how could they not be?—but if she couldn’t make things better, then she wanted to make up for the time Lou had lost because of her. For the hours she spent crying because of Mia, hours of her life she would never get back.

“Rough night,” Mia said.

“Hot date? And is she about to walk in?” Jo joked.

“If only,” Mia said. She could not confide in Jo. After leaving Queen Mary, she had never told anyone about what she had done. She had started fresh, gone to university. She lived at home her freshman year until her father had been removed from her family’s daily life. She was never going to let her mother live alone with that man. Then she’d moved to Newtown and had fallen in love with it.