‘Excuse me.’ Donna claps her hands. ‘If I could have your attention. Before we plant the rosebush – thank you, Ned Darmody – John will offer a few words. If anyone would like to speak after him, come to the front.’

‘Is he all right?’ Abby whispers. She’s standing next to me now.

‘How could he be?’ I say.

‘Why are you –?’ She points at the lamingtons, frowns as she takes them from me and puts them on the food table. A currawong trills in the branches above us. Leaves crunch under Dad’s leather soles as he rocks from one foot to the other. A child burps and the people nearby laugh. Dad clears his throat. Donna stands by his side, her wrists folded across the pleats in her skirt.

‘Off you go,’ she whispers.

‘Thank you for coming,’ Dad says. He straightens his hat, and the crowd relaxes its stiff stance once he speaks. ‘I don’t know all of you, but I know you’re here because you cared about Skye. And I’m sure she cared about every one of you.’ He stops. ‘Skye loved working at the chemist and helping people. She loved bringing babies into the world. She was, you’d all know, about to have a baby of her own, our baby.’ He bends over as though he’s about to pick something up off the ground, then stays like that. He lets out a long awful howl.

Donna reaches down for his arm as Abby pushes through the crowd and takes Dad’s other side. I follow them as they right Dad and guide him into the house.

‘Stay with him,’ Donna says to me when we reach his bedroom.

‘I couldn’t do it.’ He drops facedown onto his bed and sobs.

‘It’s okay, Dad,’ Abby says. She is crying, too. I stand with my back to both of them, resting my forehead on the closed bedroom door.

At eight o’clock the next morning, once Dad has done the rounds of his house and property, and made phone calls to check that his animals and vegetable patch (and rosebush) will be properly cared for in his absence, I carry our gear out to the car. Abby says it’ll be recuperative for Dad to be in Brisbane, with the kids, out of this house. The truth is, she needs to be home, preparing for Christmas, and far away from where we abandoned Skye.

Maybe having Mark around will help Abby get herself together – she’s more terrible at dealing with Dad’s pain than I would’ve expected. I’ve told her to stop patronising him, to stop talking like she’s a nurse in a retirement home. But she can’t hit the right note, and I can see it’s irritating both of them. She flips between pity, compassion and disinterest, though I know her weirdness is coming partly from the sheer effort of keeping our secret locked behind her lips.

Partly.

She’s bruised. It’s understandable Dad wouldn’t clock how the news of his engagement has affected Abby. But marriage is a big deal to my sister. And Dad not only committed to a woman who’s not our mother, he also didn’t talk to his family about it. I don’t care too much if I ever get married, and I figure after fifteen years Dad must be keen for some female company. Abby doesn’t see it that way.