As Ava slowed to pull off the road again, he glanced at her profile. Their rapport took no effort, yet it still surprised him. However, there was still no hint of a past memory of them in his mind, no matter how hard he tried. She touched the corner of her eye every now and then and he wondered if that was a mannerism he used to know.

They pulled in at a red cairn piled under a wizened palm tree and the engine ticked down as she unclipped her belt. ‘We’ll only do a minute here.’ She opened her door and he followed suit.

He pushed his door and stepped into a flapping twist of red dust that wrapped around him like a coat then blew past, leaving him disorientated with grit in his eyes. He blinked and picked at the corner of his eyelids. Through the blur he saw her hand cover her smile. Her other had lifted to check he wasn’t going to fall. No, he wasn’t. He felt stronger every hour and the drinks she’d given him were doing their part. His private nurse?

Ava grinned at him. ‘You were hit by a willy-willy. Funny stuff. My friend Denise says it’s good luck to be brushed by the wind.’

‘Lucky? Guess I’ve had my fair share of it in the last week.’ He patted himself down and glanced after the tiny wind spout as it twisted and danced up the road on its merry way.

She smiled, then turned away and stretched her arms up. He kept his gaze on the horizon, even though she wasn’t looking at him. ‘We’ll just stay a few minutes. I think another dust storm is brewing and I want to get home in case it does something crazy like cut visibility again.’

‘Do you want to go now?’

‘No. I like to stop, and we’ll turn off the highway soon. I make myself do it where there’s a chance of traffic. Just in case my vehicle doesn’t start again.’

‘Does it do that?’

‘Not yet.’ She was so sensible, unlike him; he often drove from A to B with only the thought of getting there as quickly as he could.

They fell into step to pace the road for her required stretching time, and once again he thought how odd the ease between them was. ‘Can I ask what you were doing before you met me on the plane in Sydney?’

‘It seems so long ago,’ she said and shook her head at the series of events neither had expected. ‘I’d been to a conference on obstetric emergencies and breech births. Which was lucky for us, but that’s another story. I’d been trying to get there for a while because I’d won a scholarship for it.’