For three weeks, this is his life, at Bili’s side. Three weeks of pure happiness, all he’s ever dreamed of. At the end of each day he goes home with her to the apartment that looks out over the water.

On this night they are on her terrace again, after a dinner of spaghetti that Jericho has cooked while Bili works at her laptop on the Collingwood Bay case in preparation for a mention in court the next morning. Jacob’s firm is acting for the other side, and his strategy is to wear down the landowners, exhaust them into compliance. With each new visit to court, each next adjournment, each next offer of money, again the landowners turn their backs, spit on the ground. They want to fight, and if this is the way they have to fight, this new court way, then they’ll fight this way.

‘He’s a bastard,’ Bili says.

But Jericho is not thinking about the landowners, or even of Jacob, whom he’s heard enough of already. On this night, the stars are glinting, whole galaxies of them, in a clear black sky. The breeze is soft. Bili is soft. Her hair is loose, freed from the knot that keeps it back, smooth and tight against her head. It bushes out, a dark halo with strands of gold, just as her mother’s once had.

Bili smiles, takes his hand. ‘It’s good you’re here,’ she says. ‘Really good.’

‘This time,’ he replies, his voice matching the gentleness of hers, ‘will you come back with me? When I’ve been to the mountain, will you come?’

‘Are you serious?’ She withdraws her hand and folds her arms into herself as if she’s been taken with a sudden chill.

‘You say it yourself – our lives are caught in the same net. It’s time, Bili. We should make a life together. It’s not as if we’ve done that well apart.’

‘Is that what you came here to say?’

‘Yes.’ He looks at her face. ‘No. Not only. I came to make peace with this place. With the mountain. With the past. Settle things.’

‘This place. Is that what it is to you? A place?’ Small lines pucker the corners of her mouth. ‘If you do make your peace with it, whatever that means, and settle things, then you can stay here.’

He gives a short laugh of surprise. ‘It’s dangerous here,’ he says. ‘For you, especially. The container. You could be killed.’

‘So?’

‘We could move between. We’re both both, aren’t we?’

‘Tourists in two lands, is that what you want? Get real.’ And then her voice softens, no longer sarcastic. ‘You haven’t lived here since you were eight.’ She sounds tired. ‘It’s okay, fair enough. You don’t know it; why should you be loyal? You’ve given up being Papuan.’ He hears the anger flare. Or is it disappointment? ‘Okay, you go. Go back to London. Forget all this. You be a white man.’

‘I’m not a white man.’ He holds out his arm, his strong brown arm, pushes it towards her. ‘I’m half. You’re more. You’re more white. Three-quarters, in fact.’