He didn’t have space in his head to think of anything to say in reply, anything to say to Flo or Greek Poppy who were hovering anxiously, or to the bloke who hit her, who was muttering, ‘I’m so sorry I’m so sorry’ over and over, while his wife bawled. Jem didn’t tell them to fuck off, or tell him that he believed him, that of course he was sorry and of course it was an accident because what sort of a fucked-up cunt runs down a woman and an octopus on purpose? He didn’t tell him because he couldn’t tell him, and he couldn’t tell him because his lips and chin were wobbling and his tongue felt too big for his mouth and a film of metallic saliva clung to his suddenly aching throat. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t do anything but think: Not my Luce not my Luce not my Luce.

Next thing he knew he was in the back of the ambulance, still barefoot, and Lucy was stirring. She was in so much pain it broke his heart; it broke his heart again, because how much can one body, one woman—no matter how tough she is—take? The paramedics gave her one of those pain-relief whistles to blow on and then she was out of it and the moment passed into the blur of lit-up night and high-beam-bleached eucalypts, framed by the ambulance windscreen. And during that long drive up to Hobart, and that long night in the emergency ward, the anticipation of tomorrow, and all the potential it carried with it—all the many potentials—emerged.

Lucy finds herself back in hospital. She finds herself, at least momentarily. She emerges from a dense, dense sleep, and there she is.

She isn’t surprised by her location. For a while she’d been in and out of consciousness and drifting in drug-induced half states, so she’d already registered that she was in the hospital on some level. But then she slept. And now she’s there: lucid, awake, present.

Jem, on the other hand, is not awake. He’s sprawled in the chair by her bed, dozing with his head hanging at an angle she’s pretty sure he’ll wake to regret. He looks like a wreck. She is a wreck. Straitjacketed by hospital sheets. Propped up by pillows. Gauzed and bandaged and breastless.

The hospital bustles on the other side of the door, but her room is relatively peaceful—sanitised and humming in that hospital way, but peaceful. It’s all so familiar, yet also not.