Eliza’s phone pinged four more times before they boarded. Rose, once, confirming Eliza’s arrival time. She’d be there to meet her. Their guestroom was already made up. The other three messages were from Lawrence in France. Wishing her bon voyage. Sharing a quick and funny story from his sister’s birthday party, along with a photograph of a stunning French scene, curving vineyards and a setting sun.

As the plane began to taxi, Eliza felt the familiar jolt, the quickening of her heart. She closed her eyes, tried not to clench her fists, kept her breathing steady.

‘We can hold hands if you want to, Fearless Flyer?’ Sullivan said.

‘I think I’ll be fine, Navillus, but thank you very much anyway.’

‘I’m right here if you need me,’ he said.

Four days after she arrived back in Australia, Eliza took a bus from Rose’s home town of Colac to Melbourne. Another bus to Maryborough, the country town in which her mother was buried.

Jetlag had helped ease her back into Australian life. So had three nights with Rose and her family. She’d played with the kids, sat up late talking, helped Harry do their traditional Sunday barbecue. Every moment made her realise how well she knew them. How welcome they made her feel.

Each evening, once they had the kitchen to themselves, Rose asked her many questions. About her godmothers. About Emmet. About Eliza’s father. About Lawrence too.

‘What will happen next?’

‘I don’t know,’ Eliza said.

As she walked down the quiet road towards the cemetery, she pulled her coat in around her. There was an autumnal bite in the May air. She hadn’t brought flowers. After the first year, she never had. It had made her too sad to see the bouquet leaning against the stone, the flowers long dead, the wrapping paper warped by summer sun and winter rain.

It was a small graveyard, at the back of a church built from golden stone. In the days following her mother’s death, there was no way she could have made decisions about where Jeannie should be buried, what should be on her gravestone. Maxie had remembered a conversation from years earlier. Over wine, during one of Maxie’s annual visits. Jeannie had been talking about Mr and Mrs Quaker, the couple who had taken her in when she was pregnant with Eliza. They’d been laid to rest in what Jeannie had said was ‘the most beautiful cemetery I’ve ever seen, as far as cemeteries go’. She’d declared that, when the time came, she’d ‘like to be cremated, thank you’.