Maybe once her furniture arrived it would be okay, she coached herself. A lick of paint, even. Then she scoffed at herself. There wouldn’t be time.

She wasn’t a farmer but she’d grown up on a farm and she knew that between caring for Will, writing for the Farming Telegraph and helping on the farm, there would be no time for anything else.

The thought of working on the farm again sent a strange rush of emotions through her. As kids, she and Will had helped their dad—Will more than she, Zara was happy to admit. Lamb marking had been one of the more fun times of farming—her job, when she was little, had been to count the lambs’ tails on the ground at the end of the day. That way they’d know how many lambs they’d marked. Even as she’d grown older and been given more complex jobs, she’d still liked climbing into the pens with the lambs and patting their cute little furry faces. Will always got tired of her getting in the way. While he was trying to catch the lambs to put them in the cradle, she would be trying to pat them.

A sad smile crossed her face as she remembered her dad finally getting annoyed too. ‘If you really have to pat them, Zara, for goodness sake go and see if there’re any orphans and bring them home.’

So she had and Lamb Chops had joined the family, quickly becoming everyone’s favourite. By the time she was six months, Lamb Chops had had the kelpies bluffed and would eat their pellets when they weren’t looking. As time had gone on and she’d had to be put out in the paddock with the other ewes, she’d learned to stand at the fence and baa until someone came and scratched her head. Then she’d taught the other ewes to follow her down the drafting race when it was time to draft again. Lamb Chops had lived to the ripe old age of twelve, and she’d been buried in the beautiful sunny spot next to the creek, near the graves of all the dogs who had passed on.

Pulling her thoughts back to her new house, Zara realised the thick white walls had hairline cracks starting at the ceiling and wending down to the floor. They would have to stay a dirty white for the time being. She wished the windows were bigger; many of the rooms were dim because the sunlight couldn’t filter through.

Zara guessed the house had been built in the early nineteen hundreds, like a lot of the houses in rural South Australia. Maybe there were stories here.

There were wooden floorboards all through the house and there was a fireplace in the lounge. She’d need wood; the winters here were bitter. She could remember having to go out and chip the ice from the dogs’ water bowls, and sometimes, after a particularly cold night, the pipes in the house would freeze and the shower wouldn’t run in the morning.