‘Yes.’

‘When’s The Prime Cut due to be completed?’ I scrolled through the information. ‘Eighteen months,’ I said. ‘That could push out. But whether it does or doesn’t, how can we be sure that Ivy … ?’

Even as I formulated the question, the answer appeared. I looked at Chanel, at her calm, steady face. Lorna’s voice came out of the past to find me. It said, ‘You can’t count on Frank.’ The disturbing thing was that I could always count on Chanel.

A week went by. I don’t believe I slept. You could say that I was facing a choice between my mother and my wife, but it went much deeper than that. I’d arrived at one of those defining moments, when a person has to choose between the future and the past.

Chanel sent me a YouTube link. She wrote, ‘It’s best to be clear about what might lie ahead.’ The link brought up a video in which a woman described nursing her father through terminal bowel cancer. That was a different kind of future, one nobody ever wanted. The woman was pleading for the legalisation of assisted dying. I expected Chanel to discuss the video with me that evening, but she returned late. She’d stopped off after Pilates to pick up a tres leches cake – my current favourite – and she was exhausted after her long day. When I woke that night, my mind summoned the minister’s words on the steps of parliament: Dignity, choice and speed. They were reassuring words. There were certain terrible sentences uttered by the woman in the video, and then there was dignity, choice and speed. That woman had wanted only what was best for her father. I thought, Can a discussion do any harm?

‘It can’t do any harm to discuss things with Ivy, can it?’ I asked Chanel a few days later.

She thought for a while. ‘I don’t see how it can,’ she said.

‘Lay out the options kind of thing.’

‘That sounds so sensible.’

‘Just so that Ivy can make an informed choice.’

‘It seems only fair to her, really.’

So we arranged to see Bram after work that Friday – it wasn’t unusual, we all have a drink or dinner together from time to time. Thin, petulant rain was falling when I finished up at the Department. Waiting for the lift, I looked out of the window and saw the city stacked and tense over a roof of umbrellas.

By the time my tram reached Richmond, the sky had cleared, and the clouds carried thin golden crusts. A ruro went past, cuddling a rat with a dog’s face – no, I mean that the other way around. I got to Bram’s building just as Chanel was parking the Xcessiva in the rock-star spot right outside. She can parallel park anything anywhere in twenty seconds. How it’s done is treasured family lore: you line up your steering wheel with the midpoint of the rear window of the vehicle you’re parking behind, and then – AND ONLY THEN – start angling in.