I turn away from Mark and look up at the darkening treetops. I draw a slow breath. ‘Charlie. But I let him.’

Dad yanks open the sliding door and goes inside.

Mark stares at me but I can’t meet his eye. The hairs on my arms rise. I hear the frogs begin their evening chant, growing louder as though they’re an advancing army.

‘She swerved to avoid us, but there was nowhere for her to go, nowhere safe. Such a narrow road and we were right in the middle of it. If I’d woken a minute earlier . . . I think about it nonstop, Mark. I wanted to tell you but . . . It was never the right time.’

I wait for him to speak. I know he’ll be angry but I feel some relief. He’ll know what to do. But when he does finally look at me, his eyes are ice-cold.

‘There’s so much wrong with this I don’t know where to start, Abby. A hit and run. A pregnant woman. And you’ve been lying to my face for weeks. Lying,’ his voice rises, ‘to me, your father, the police.’

I should speak. He’s right about all of it. But I’m in shock, and my words have fled to someplace less painful.

‘You handed your keys over to someone just off an eight-hour flight then went to sleep? Knowing he’s never been to the farm and is mentally a child.’

‘I know, I know,’ I say quietly. ‘He wanted to drive.’

‘Oh, and God forbid Charlie doesn’t get to do whatever he feels like. How could you be so stupid? And, what, you tried to get her into the car by yourself? He didn’t want to help you? Abby, you wouldn’t leave a dog to die like that.’

‘She was already dead.’

He swears, then goes inside.

Left alone in the sandpit, I watch as the lights come on in the kitchen, the bathroom and Sarah’s bedroom. Mark moves between the fridge and stovetop, making dinner for our children. What feelings will rear up now I’ve purged myself by speaking the truth? Everybody knows nature abhors a vacuum.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Tuesday 31 December 1974

Charlie

I take the window table at Melina’s coffee shop in West End, a small, laidback place in a weatherboard worker’s cottage. It sits between the Anarchist Centre, a grey besser-brick building with a locked glass-covered noticeboard out front – the irony of which seems to have escaped them – and the Greek grocery store. Across the road is a row of peeling, raggedy-garden share houses. I’m waiting for Ryan and Sal before I order food. They’ve ducked up the road to get coffee, bread, olives and other supplies for us to take back to Sal’s cousin’s place. We’ve crashed there for days and while she’s a very relaxed chick, we get the feeling she’s had enough of us. We’ll be party-hopping tonight but hope to end up back at hers, so food will go some way to securing us one more night in her house. While I wait, I’m considering how to broach the topic of Bali with them. I know in their hearts they must want to go back. And life will be cool again once we’re there.