I pulled Biddy closer. Hugging was the thing, just hugging it out, even though Sarah was terrified Margot and Ed would catch a glimpse of me and Biddy being affectionate and deduce, quite rightly, that we were in a relationship and, quite wrongly, that I was cheating on Sarah. They’d say something to Sarah’s great-aunt and uncle, of course, and then … Sarah wasn’t ready for her full coming out, not yet. But you know what, Sarah? Go fuck yourself, because –

She appeared at the living-room door, eyebrows arched. ‘The kids are coming through.’ She shot a glance at the bay window. ‘You do know that Ed and Margot are sitting just out there, right?’

Biddy and I walked down the gravelly path, shooing flies, climbed across a rusted wire fence, traversed an overgrown field, alert for snakes, puffed and wheezed up an incline flanked by gum trees. At the top, oh, Jesus, we were sweating, a view for miles, the wind in our hair.

‘Gosh,’ Biddy said.

‘Yeah, I know.’

Everything seemed bigger than it had on Christmas Day, the air clearer. Even the flies – I was more tolerant of them. Just being out, away from the farmhouse, I could breathe.

‘Has Zac been in touch to complain about me yet?’ she said.

Yes, he had – he’d messaged to tell me he’d contacted Biddy on Christmas Eve to ask if she wanted to hang out with him while Sarah, me and the kids were away. She’d replied, a little cruelly I thought, No.

‘There’s something a bit off about him,’ she said.

‘Yeah, well …’

Zac had texted me: I guess it’s because I was in jail?

* * *

‘Do I have to keep some of these for Olly?’ Sophie said.

‘Not really,’ I said, squeezing her knees, marching through the dark streets of Corowa. ‘But if you wanted to …’

She rustled the lolly bag, chewed, dripped saliva on my head. I knew the way, it was fine, but we had to keep overtaking other families with glow sticks and matching singlets. Get out of the way, you bunch of … I held Sophie’s leg to my chest with one hand, took Biddy’s hand in the other. The fireworks wouldn’t start until half past nine, we’d parked near the museum at twenty past, it was OK. And who actually cared if we got there for the start? Me. I cared.

Carly and Chris had arrived in Numurkah the previous day and come to see us in the evening. We drank tea, sat round the kitchen table.

‘So, when did you all meet?’ Chris said.

He still didn’t know. Biddy was just his son-in-law’s female friend who’d driven all the way from Melbourne to sleep on a mattress on a floor in the sunroom so she could see in the new year with his daughter and her family. That was perfectly normal.