‘But how did you break in?’ Maxie was trying to appear calm. She wasn’t.

‘I didn’t have to.’ Jeannie grinned. ‘One of the joys of country living. Everyone trusts everyone. No one locks their door. I’d save up a pile of leaflets from the post, make sure Eliza was fast asleep, then go off on my rounds. Knock on the front door, then on the back door. No answer, in I’d go. I’d be out again in five minutes. I never did any damage, broke anything. I took what I needed for us, or what I could sell easily. A necklace, or anything gold. Silverware was surprisingly lucrative. That was also a great thing about country towns. Several generations, heirlooms handed down. And let me tell you, girls, those snooty antique dealers aren’t as ethical as you might expect.’

Olivia and Maxie were now speechless.

‘Anyway, I was a communist back then, so it was okay in terms of my ethics,’ Jeannie continued, topping up their glasses. ‘Property belongs to all.’

‘That’s communism?’

‘Communism Jeannie Miller–style, yep.’ She sat back then, looking from one to the other. ‘Oh, if you could only see your faces.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You believed me, didn’t you? That I would leave my baby daughter, the absolute light of my life, on her own while I went sneaking around a country town, where everybody knows each other, where people notice if a fly from out of town happens to buzz in. Yet I somehow managed to gaily flit in and out, stealing family heirlooms and fluffy toys?’ She began to laugh, the laugh Olivia and Maxie now hated hearing. ‘I wish I had done it. It’s a fucking ingenious idea, actually.’

She picked up the blue bowl. ‘Maxie, I bought this in a charity shop. It cost me two dollars. And I bought that in a charity shop’ – she pointed to the sofa – ‘and those curtains. And my food? I bought that with money I saved from my pension, or money I earned in the part-time job I got while Eliza was in crèche, like thousands of other single mothers before me. Will I run through my CV for you now? Hospital cleaner. Filing clerk. And currently the finest shelf-stacker in all the land. See these hands?’ She held them up. ‘They can stack twenty cans on a single shelf faster than you can say Beanz Meanz Heinz.’ She laughed again. ‘More fool me, in hindsight. Being Australia’s answer to Robin Hood would have been far more lucrative.’

They tried to laugh it off that night. It wasn’t easy. They really had believed her. They still weren’t entirely convinced it was made up. But in an unspoken agreement they decided to let it go.