Back to Sawyer’s. I told Nic I needed a week off for the wedding and he called me a brat. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘But when you get home, you’re applying for Rachel’s job.’ It seemed like a small price to pay, and it terrified me, but I felt something else, too; something almost good.

Back to Georgia. Talked until I was wrung out. Or didn’t talk at all. Cried. With sadness or anger or frustration. With gratitude. That I was still there, that Lina was still sitting in the car outside, reading a book or mapping out the latest place she was taking me.

It was hard. Sometimes everything was hard. Some nights I didn’t sleep, and I wondered if it was working at all, and I asked Georgia to fix it all for me, and she shook her head and said it didn’t work that way, and I knew she was right.

‘If it makes any difference,’ she said, ‘you’re doing that really well yourself so far.’

And I smiled and then I cried, because it was hard and maybe it would be forever. But I had to keep doing it.

Back to Lina’s car, the seat changing shape to suit my bones.

‘You’re not just doing this because of the wedding, are you?’ Lina asked me, speeding up the freeway towards Newcastle as I clutched my blue elephant, Thoughts about the road toll flickering through my mind, forcing me to breathe a little harder. But manageable, as Georgia would say. Nearly normal.

‘No,’ I said, too fast, because it was a fear I’d had too. We flew out in a few weeks and I was still tensing every time she changed lanes. I was dreading it, but more than that I was dreading it being over.

‘What are you going to do after?’

‘I don’t know.’ I stared out the window, at the trees and the sky and the vast, huge expanse of space that I’d never explored, feeling terrified. And something else. Something almost good.

35 MONDAY, NOVEMBER

35

MONDAY, NOVEMBER

Matt drove us to the airport, so early the sky was still a bruised grey and the roads weren’t completely clogged. Lina sat in the back with me and held my hand, squeezed it tight. My stomach hurt. My head hurt. My chest hurt. When I’d seen Georgia the Thursday before she’d told me I’d be fine, but I didn’t feel fine. I wasn’t ready, but then I looked at Lina beside me and her face was so much—excitement, happiness, fear—and I knew what I had to do. What I wanted to do.