There are several seconds of silence. Mum asks me, in a tone of intense reserve, exactly what I’m going to do. I say I just want to try something new, freelancing maybe. Mum says it’s all very sudden and have I really thought this through. I say yes. My tone tells her this is very important to me and she can’t stop me. Mum asks me to consider staying at her place for a couple of weeks before I go. She says please. She says she wants to see me before she loses me for a very long time again. She says my grandmother would want it too. And my brother. Simon says, come on Finny, be a sport. I tell myself I have to be a little less selfish when it comes to my mother, I have to see her more. I smile at her and say okay.

As the chatter and questions come back to our table I excuse myself and walk through the vibrating room and go outside to great gulps of clean night air and space, and I think to myself that grief has given me clarity and I feel a core of rightness and calmness deep in me. Some decisions in life, just like love, can come surely and swiftly. And rescue just as swiftly. It just takes courage to act on them.

We drive home to Alice Springs in the rain. The creeks have come up fast. They’re over the road and I drop down to first and power through the swift, soft brown water. I feel a tugging at my car’s underbelly but I keep my steady course.

‘You’re better at this than me,’ says Rick grinning from the passenger seat.

Rick got me out of the still white room in Mum’s house in the city and got me into the desert. I would’ve done it anyway, but I went with Mum’s blessing with a man beside me. Rick honked the horn and drove us out of Sydney until we’d hit the mountains and then we stopped at a servo and I took over from there. I told him I was driving into the desert and I told him he could get out at any time. He didn’t. I drove west into a difficult freedom.

The desert’s my home now. Red dust is strong on my feet. I’m doing what I want to do. Writing. Living the dream I gave up so long ago. It’s a spare kind of life and it’s a glittering loneliness when Rick isn’t around. He keeps on visiting. I don’t love him. I can’t, not yet. Through my eyes I’m showing Max the red desert. The desert that he never got to.