She didn’t wait to hear the rest. Nor did she go to the theatre that night. When Olivia came looking for her, she pretended she was getting the flu. She hid in her room for the next two days, curled up, feigning symptoms. She was never so glad to get to the airport at the end of a godmother holiday.

She eventually told her mother. Jeannie had guessed something had happened and hounded her until she confessed. Afterwards, she insisted Eliza do a sketch of ‘This Alex’. The two of them took it outside and set it on fire, under the stars. She still remembered her mother’s gleeful face as she lit the match. ‘We’ve cursed him now, darling. Two Australian witches. He’ll never be happy in his life.’

Afterwards, back inside, they’d talked more. Eliza had felt so loved.

Her mother had been as straight-talking as ever. ‘Thank God you didn’t have sex with him. What a waste that would have been. He didn’t deserve someone as special as you.’

She’d eventually felt glad too. When she finally did have sex for the first time, four months later, it had been with a kind, gentle boy from her high school. They’d been dating for six weeks. Jeannie guessed immediately, somehow, when Eliza came home from a sleepover at his house.

‘Did you use protection?’

‘Mum!’ she’d said. Yes, she admitted.

‘And did you enjoy it?’

‘Mum!’ Yes, she admitted.

‘My little girl is a woman,’ Jeannie said.

‘Mum!’

‘Sorry. My tall beautiful girl is a woman.’

You were so lucky, Rose had said, when they swapped stories early in their friendship. She’d come from a large Catholic family. Sex had been taboo. Her brothers had all been told to ‘keep it in their pockets’ and there had been the assumption that the girls simply weren’t interested in sex.

In her hotel room, Eliza made a decision. She wouldn’t wait for Olivia to introduce them again. She’d go and find Alex now. Get it over and done with. She imagined what her mother would say. She could almost hear her voice.

That’s my girl.

Two floors down, at the desk in her office, Olivia was on the phone to Maxie.

‘She’s as gorgeous as ever. A bit frazzled from the flight, and she still seems to be dressed in Gillian’s cast-offs, but she’s here and that’s all that counts.’

‘Has she asked you any questions about Jeannie yet? About her father? Any of it?’

‘Maxie, she’s hardly off the plane. She also wants to wait until it’s the three of us, remember?’

‘I’m feeling sick every time I think about it.’

‘Can you please stop being so dramatic?’

‘You know I can’t. I always ring her on a Monday, around now. Will she be suspicious if I don’t?’