Five months ago, Paula had offered Stacey a place to stay for as long as the family needed. Stacey had moved into the small room that used to be a study and the kids—Cameron was ten, Poppy just turned eight—shared the spare bedroom, next door to Paula’s. It was the first time Paula had ever lived with children in her house. These days she found herself thinking a lot about what to cook, which dishes might appeal to kids. She had discovered that if she made any foodstuff sufficiently crunchy, Cameron and Poppy would happily eat it. Tonight, she bought the ingredients to make chicken schnitzel, sugar snaps and roast vegies with enough chopped pecans and parmesan sprinkled on top to make them crispy.

Paula and her husband Remy had bought the Californian bungalow in Earlwood years ago, and just as they’d finally finished renovating it, he got sick. Now, after Paula’s long quiet stretch living there alone, she was enjoying having Stacey and Cameron and Poppy in the house, relishing the voices bouncing up the hallway. She’d developed a fondness for the earthy, tangy smell of grubby kids and their school clobber.

At the start, Paula had to forbid Stacey from saying ‘Thank you’ and ‘Sorry for invading your house’ ten or twenty times a day. They’d been friends since they were twelve, for God’s sake. If Stacey was in trouble and Paula could help, then the solution was simple and there was no reason for I-don’t-deserve-this gratitude. But Stacey’s old buoyancy had been so eroded that the impulse to apologise for herself would overcome her. Paula would turn to find Stacey looking at her with tears oozing up, stammering out more embarrassed thanks. So they developed a jokey system whereby Stacey would add pen-strokes to a post-it on the fridge, like a prisoner marking off the days—a pen-stroke for every time she felt the urge to apologise or gush her appreciation. Paula agreed that, down the track, they could convert the tally into some appropriate Festival of Gratitude—a fancy weekend away or whatever.

Once she moved into Paula’s house, Stacey pulled things together remarkably quickly—or at least, she threw herself into the practical processes with determination, even if she was still fractured below the busy surface. She made sure Cameron and Poppy were settled at their new school. She found Cameron a good counsellor. She took on a fill-in maternity leave contract as a teacher at a preschool and there was already talk of a permanent job. She was sorting out her finances and legal mess. She signed up for sessions with a psychologist herself.

To see Stacey now, to measure the change from the fragile woman her friends had found in the Ballina motel—well, Paula was relieved and surprised and bursting with admiration for her.