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Back The Godmothers Save as PDF
Chapters (50)
  1. Cover
  2. Praise
  3. Dedication
  4. Chapter One
  5. Chapter Two
  6. Chapter Three
  7. Chapter Four
  8. Chapter Five
  9. Chapter Six
  10. Chapter Seven
  11. Chapter Eight
  12. Chapter Nine
  13. Chapter Ten
  14. Chapter Eleven
  15. Chapter Twelve
  16. Chapter Thirteen
  17. Chapter Fourteen
  18. Chapter Fifteen
  19. Chapter Sixteen
  20. Chapter Seventeen
  21. Chapter Eighteen
  22. Chapter Nineteen
  23. Chapter Twenty
  24. Chapter Twenty-one
  25. Chapter Twenty-two
  26. Chapter Twenty-three
  27. Chapter Twenty-four
  28. Chapter Twenty-five
  29. Chapter Twenty-six
  30. Chapter Twenty-seven
  31. Chapter Twenty-eight
  32. Chapter Twenty-nine
  33. Chapter Thirty
  34. Chapter Thirty-one
  35. Chapter Thirty-two
  36. Chapter Thirty-three
  37. Chapter Thirty-four
  38. Chapter Thirty-five
  39. Chapter Thirty-six
  40. Chapter Thirty-seven
  41. Chapter Thirty-eight
  42. Chapter Thirty-nine
  43. Chapter Forty
  44. Chapter Forty-one
  45. Chapter Forty-two
  46. Epilogue
  47. Extract from Those Faraday Girls
  48. Acknowledgements
  49. About the Author
  50. Also by Monica McInerney

THE SPOTLIGHTS ON THEM GO OUT BRIEFLY. ONLY JEANNIE IS NOW VISIBLE. SHE STOPS SWINGING. SHE IS STARING AHEAD. SHE IS SILENT. THE SPOTLIGHTS APPEAR AGAIN ON MAXIE AND OLIVIA.

OLIVIA: We knew then that we could never tell anyone what we’d done.

MAXIE: Not the police. Not the coroner. Not anyone. [PAUSE] Especially not Eliza.

LONG PAUSE.

THEY SPEAK THE FOLLOWING LINE IN UNISON.

OLIVIA: It had to be our secret. Eliza needed us.

MAXIE: It had to be our secret. Eliza needed us.

Epilogue

EPILOGUE

One year later

Eliza was in the small garden of the apartment she’d rented in Collingwood. She was watering her collection of pot plants and keeping a close eye on the time. It was a Sunday, so the traffic on the freeway to the airport wouldn’t be as busy as on a weekday, but she couldn’t be late.

It still felt like a novelty to have every weekend off. It was one of many things she loved about being a temp. Eleven months earlier, she’d signed up with an agency that specialised in placing executive assistants. She’d discovered she had a gift for walking into a busy, chaotic workplace, quickly evaluating what needed to be done and setting up systems to make it happen. Perhaps in the future she might go full-time again. For now, she was enjoying the feeling of freedom.

Not that she was doing nothing on those free weekends. A month after her return from Edinburgh, while settling in to her new suburb, she’d walked down Smith Street and seen a colourful sign in a shop window. ‘Arty volunteers needed!’ it said. ‘All paints supplied!’ It was for a drop-in arts centre for local kids. A Saturday art club. She’d phoned the number that afternoon. Since then, for the past ten months, she had spent three hours every Saturday dressed in her oldest, now paint-spattered clothes, alternating between trying to teach a rowdy group of eight- to twelve-year-olds how to draw and paint, and trying to stop those same kids from flinging paint and paper aeroplanes at each other. She loved every minute of it. So did Sullivan. He’d begged his mother to let him sign up for the class as soon as Eliza told him about it. His paintings of lemurs and leafy sea dragons had been a great hit with the other kids.

Rose was all for it, of course. She liked teasing Eliza about her perfect ‘work–life balance’. It wasn’t perfect, of course – her work still brought as much frustration and as many difficult bosses and clients as it ever had, but she had learned to leave it behind when she left the office at the end of each day.