‘Josh is on the India trade panel. In fact, he’s leading it. They’re looking to increase trade links.’

Fan-fucking-tastic for Josh. Let me get out the streamers, in between trying to find my lost child. How could life just go on? This afternoon, Josh went to the airport, walked through the scanners, boarded an aeroplane and flew to Adelaide. How could that happen?

‘Lexie, are you okay?’ Tara asked in the silence. ‘Where are you?’

Was I okay? What a stupid question.

‘Are you going to say anything about my son?’ I demanded.

I heard a sharp intake of breath and then the muffled sounds of Tara moving around. Getting out of bed, maybe. Moving further away from her girls so they could sleep in peace? Rest in peace. Ha, what did that mean anyway? My son wasn’t being left to rest in peace. He was being dragged through the mud yet again.

‘I’m sorry about your son.’

‘Is that it?’

Tara was quiet for a moment. I guess she’d never heard me like this before. Belligerent, bitchy. As straight talking as her.

‘Well, I don’t understand why you didn’t tell us,’ Tara said slowly. ‘I’ve shared so much personal stuff. You could have said something. Julia told us about her father’s death.’

Julia’s father had died the month that I’d joined the playgroup. At sixty-two years old, he’d been fit and still playing Masters hockey. Her mum had come home with the shopping and found him on the lounge room floor. A massive stroke. She’d dropped the shopping bags, rushed to his side and called an ambulance.

But in the time it took for the ambulance to arrive, her mother had put all the groceries away in the fridge. That detail had stuck with me. Only now that I knew Julia better did I realise—like mother, like daughter.

While I’d waited for the ambulance, I’d crouched next to Marty on the floor, watching my husband trying to resuscitate our son. Begging Marty to feel a breath, find a pulse. I’d been stroking my baby’s fine hair, holding his cold fingers. And when the ambulance had tried to take him away, I screamed and wouldn’t let him go.

‘I’m sorry that I can’t come over right now, Lexie, with the kids asleep and Josh away.’ Tara interrupted my memories. ‘Do you want to come here?’

I didn’t want to leave my home but her kindness was so uncharacteristic that I burst into tears.

32 BRENDAN

32

BRENDAN

TEN STITCHES. RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF HIS FOREHEAD. A HARRY POTTER scar. He’d have to tell everyone that he got it snowboarding. Practising a misty flip. Yeah, that’d work.

‘How’re you feeling now, Bren?’ His girlfriend sat down next to him on the hospital bed, a can of lemonade in her hand.