Rika opened the envelope. ‘Return immediately. Arrangements made. Bougainville talks tomorrow 3 pm.’ It was signed ‘Derek’.

‘Tomorrow,’ she said. ‘He has to go back tomorrow.’

That’s when Martha saw dissent. Faces that had been open to Rika minutes before snapped closed. Naomi stared at the ground. A wail of complaint – or grief, perhaps – rose from aya Aita. Dulcie walked Angel towards the cookhouse, and it was clear from the way she handled her that she was angry. The women were talking so fast Rika couldn’t catch what anyone was saying. It’s what they did when they didn’t want her to follow.

‘I shouldn’t have opened it,’ Rika said. ‘They think I wrote the words. Willed him away.’

For two days at the vasái, up in the high village, Martha had thought her doubts were misplaced. With the dancing and the feasting, the competing speeches and gifts, Rika had faded to the edge of proceedings. She and Martha talked more there than was possible in Aaron’s village; Rika relaxed, let her fears subside. She went with Aaron into the forest at dawn to see the birds. Naomi took her to the spring deep in the forest, where the spirits of babies gather, and afterwards Martha lay with them in Naomi’s brother’s garden house, talking and sucking sugarcane. At the end of the vasái, Aaron took the camera from her so he could put her in the same frame as Ruth and Naomi, the kids piled in around them. Aya Aita posed beside her with a grimace that might have been a smile.

And now heads were turned, eyes hard, reminding Rika of who she was – an outsider; worse, because she had worked her way into Aaron and weakened his links with them. Why would she not be the cause of the telegram that had come to draw him away into a vanishing that with every season took him further from the daily reality of garden and reef and moon?

‘My name is Dawson.’ The clerk was standing next to Rika.

‘Rika,’ she said, putting out her hand. ‘And Martha.’ She, too, shook his hand. Then, looking towards the women, Rika asked, ‘What are they saying?’

‘The family, they are very sad.’

‘They think it’s my fault.’

He was apologetic. ‘They’re village people. No education. They think bad spirit has come. I tell them it is the government.’

Through the hibiscus clumps at the edge of the clearing beside the cookhouse, old Aita was rocking on her haunches. The women had retreated there, not working, or chewing betel in the shade, but moving around, talking in querulous voices. Naomi kept her face turned from Rika. Only hours before Rika had been with them, gossiping about the vasái, laughing at the flirtations that had rippled along the dance line, speculating on marriages and adulteries. Once again, she’d let herself touch that tender place of hope, and now this.

‘You okay,’ Dawson said to Rika. It was neither statement nor question. He was looking out to the reef. A few clouds were blowing in from the west.