Anita jerked with fright and spun around to see Mr Petrakis peering over the hedge from his front yard. The Petrakis family had lived in the house next door for forty years, having brought up their kids there, minded their grandkids there and grown grapes across the trellis in the backyard to make wine so putrid you could feel it corroding your stomach lining within seconds of ingestion. Paula had always had a great relationship with the family, scooting next door whenever one of the grandkids was sick or injured and graciously accepting homegrown vegetables and bottles of the corrosive wine over the fence. When Remy was sick, and in the weeks after Stacey and the kids were murdered, trays of food from the Petrakis kitchen would frequently appear on Paula’s front porch.

‘Hi, Theo,’ Anita said.

Theo Petrakis hollered towards his wife, ‘It’s okay. It’s just Anita.’ Then he turned back to her. ‘I didn’t see your car, so I didn’t know who it was.’

‘Sorry if I gave you a scare.’

Theo made a no-worries gesture. ‘She isn’t here.’

‘Do you know where she is?’ Anita asked.

He shook his head and Anita felt a little stab of being judged by Mr Petrakis for not knowing where her friend was, for not taking better care of her. Or maybe she only imagined he was judging her.

‘Dr K has been through a lot,’ said Theo.

‘Yes. That’s why I want to make sure she’s okay. Do you know when she’s coming back?’

‘No. She rang me, asked me to get my son-in-law to look after her yard once a fortnight. She sends the money to his bank account.’

‘So it sounds like she’s going to be away for a while,’ Anita said.

Theo shrugged and nodded. ‘We just want Dr K to be well and happy.’

Anita gave up any plan to check inside the house, figuring that would be too distressing, and she barely made it back to her car before the weeping overtook her. She wanted to ring Stacey and talk to her about what they should do for Paula. She wanted Stacey to be alive and Paula to be well and happy.

She thought about the day Stacey and the kids moved in to Paula’s house, unloading Stacey’s old red Subaru, carting their bags inside, the few belongings they’d brought with them when they fled the Maryvale property.

Mr and Mrs Petrakis had worked together to lift Poppy over the fence so she could feed their backyard chickens, while Cameron insisted on helping his mother unpack the bags.

Anita recalled the way Stacey looked at her kids—with such relief, amusement, pride, a staggering amount of love. When Stacey realised Anita was observing her, she had laughed, sending herself up for being such a pathetically besotted mother. She turned to Anita with that smile which could radiate joy through an entire room.