Lou was having breakfast at home. She had told her parents that Mia Miller was working at the Pink Bean, but she hadn’t told them that it was Mia who had come up with the idea for the coffee/bookshop. She didn’t talk about Mia much at all, except for the short announcement after spotting her at the Pink Bean for the first time, because it was not something she wanted to revisit with her parents. Not because they didn’t care, but because they cared too much. Her father especially would want to have endless conversations about it, about how she felt now, and how she had dealt with the emotions of worthlessness over the years. He had a tendency to see her for a much more delicate person than she actually was. Lou had had to toughen up; she’d had no choice. And running to her daddy was no longer a tactic she wished to employ.

“Penny for your thoughts,” her dad said. “You’ve been chewing on the same mouthful of granola for five minutes.”

“Just some stuff going on at work,” Lou said.

“Ah, I thought it was another date gone wrong.” He flashed her a smile. Lou’s mother had left for work already and it was just the two of them at the breakfast table.

Lou glanced at her father and realized that, despite her wanting to spare him from her recent agony, he was probably the only person she could talk to about this. He knew and understood to an extent no one else could, because he had known Lou all her life, and he had been the one whose arms she had fled into when she was running away from Mia’s taunts. He knew how sensitive she was. Not just because of what had happened to her, but by nature. He knew because he was her father.

When Lou was a teenager, on her worst days, it could hurt her so much that the color of her skin didn’t match his, and she believed he couldn’t possibly understand how she felt. Yet she had always turned to him more than to her mother, whose skin was a few shades darker than hers, and who took so much pride in being an Aboriginal person. Lou could never reconcile the fierceness of her mother’s pride with the insults Mia Miller threw at her.

Yet, she didn’t say anything to her father. Partly because she didn’t even know where to start, and partly because she didn’t want him to worry about her the way he always did—she was thirty-two, for heaven’s sake. But mostly because Micky had been right. In her heart, she knew that the only way to find out was to ask Mia. Ask her what had made her say the things she had said, again and again.