“I’m going to stay on for a few more days too,” Kate said.

“How come?”

“I’ve hardly seen Mum so I’ll stay till the weekend, maybe into next week. I’ve taken some more leave.” She looked pointedly at Bree as she sat back in her chair.

“Well, aren’t you lucky to accrue leave,” Bree snapped. “I can’t seem to find the piece of paper that records how much I’m owed.”

Kate opened her mouth then closed it again. Music blared from the radio, filling the silence, and then Kate spoke. “Shouldn’t we be out with Dad now?”

Bree glanced at the kitchen clock. “Give him a few more minutes.”

Natalie blinked at the numbers on her mobile phone until they came into focus. She sat up quickly as she realised it was after seven. Milt would probably be up and gone. It was the first day of tailing and he’d want to make sure everything was ready. She hoped one of the girls had cooked him some break—She stopped, berated herself. Why should she care? Then the other part of her felt guilty because she did.

She groaned and swung her feet to the ground, shivering at the cold boards beneath her feet. Bree’s spare room in the quarters was a junk room really. The place she’d dumped anything she didn’t need. The scattered boxes and bags had been pushed against one wall in an obvious attempt to tidy up. Bree must have done a quick rearrange when she’d made the bed for Olive. At least the bed had still been made up.

The night had been chilly and Natalie had been awake for half of it, at war with herself, going over her life and what had brought her to this moment. She’d moved on from worrying over Jack being Milt’s son and the implications of that, to questioning her marriage all over again, and that had made her ponder her life and what she’d done with it. Even the thought of going back to her teaching didn’t inspire any excitement like it once had. She was fifty-eight; surely there was more she should have achieved by now. The anomaly in her breast had started the questioning and then had become jumbled with the uncertainties that Jack’s presence had evoked.

It occurred to her in the night that she’d been abducted by aliens and returned to someone else’s body. That was a better explanation than facing the truth: her life was not what she thought. With a burst of clarity the words paradigm shift repeated in her mind. She’d first heard of a paradigm shift at a conference she’d attended many years ago. The presenter had explained that a paradigm is the way each person sees the world and a paradigm shift enables you to view the world from a totally different perspective.