The Richmond Man was due today, but hours later – nothing. I called him. He did not pick up. He did not respond to messages. Maybe he was busy lifting boxes . . .

I paced around the kitchen, made more coffee. I texted Dan. ‘What’s going on?’ Nothing.

But just as I’d come to believe that nothing else would happen, the most horrible sound: a heavy vehicle, beeping and stopping, backing slowly into a space on the street outside the house. The moving van was here – and with it, my future.

And then the message hit my phone:

‘I accept your apology.’

I stared at this. I glanced up the screen, but the last message was from him and it said ‘Is there anything else?’ – a question he’d sent after he’d dodged me on Smith Street, a question I’d not been prepared to answer at that time.

A knock at the door. I looked at it.

I knew what was out there. And how neat was this solution – two inconvenient housemates, and Dan had managed to get rid of both of us at once.

‘Ugh,’ I texted Dan.

But the truth is I wasn’t mad, I was frightened. By the mettle this would take – its ordinariness, its substance. The things this friend would ask of me were of a different order. There would be steep requirements. I wasn’t up to the job. And still the knocks kept coming.

I walked to the door and opened it, the big moment was here. I saw the silver fabric, which was held up like a screen, bouncing back the ripest sun of January. And it had brought its things with it, a truck of new mysteries, hauled here from an apartment that I had never seen.

‘Should I come in?’ he asked me.

I had no idea.

Goodbye, Dan, and thank you for the complicated gift.

Most of this story was written on stolen land.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In devising a story that covers eight weeks from a limited perspective, I did so in conversation with a number of histories and lived realities that are only briefly indicated in the book, some quite obliquely. While this novel was written with faith in the unsaid, here I recognise the existence of the unsaid and would like to indicate my respect for it.

This novel would be nowhere without Marya Spence, so thank you, Marya, and thank you, Clare Mao, for working very hard on its behalf. Thank you, Cullen Stanley for representing it in Australia, Cate Blake for acquiring it and breaking down its structure, Johannes Jakob for an exacting and even-handed edit, and Nikki Christer for publishing it with imagination and judgement. Thanks to Bella Arnott-Hoare for publicising it well, and to Laura Thomas for designing a perfect cover.