Ben looks between Darcy and Ty, sensing he’s interrupted something. ‘So …’ He pauses. ‘Are we right to go?’

Darcy looks to Ty. ‘Are we?’ She’s desperately hoping he isn’t about to throw in the towel.

He takes his time to reply, but finally meets her eye. ‘Yeah.’ He nods. ‘The past is in the past. Let’s get on with it.’

Darcy exhales the breath she’s been holding, looking down at the questions she has to ask him about Samara, but a seed of worry has started to grow.

Chapter 30

30

Twelve years earlier

‘… My fault … the coffee.’

‘Sorry, Mum? What did you say?’ Penny looks up from her textbook, thrown by her mum’s voice. She’s barely spoken over the past few days.

‘It was all that coffee,’ her mum manages, her voice husky and dry.

Penny reaches for the ice. Her mum goes to wave it away, but then tilts her head so Penny can place a few chips in her mouth.

Penny waits, putting her book to the side. She has a maths exam the next day and after months of neglected study is struggling to make sense of the numbers and formulas in front of her. Her mum suddenly panicked last week and said Penny needed to keep her studies up. She’s in year eleven and her mum insists she needs to be thinking about university. Penny doesn’t want to think about university, she doesn’t even want to think about next week, but if trying to study makes her mum happy, she’ll do it. So here she sits, by her mum’s hospital bed, trying to care about simultaneous equations and differentiation.

Penny watches her mum suck on the ice chips, letting her mouth moisten.

‘I read an article in a magazine a few years ago.’ Her voice is low, and Penny has to concentrate on each word. ‘About coffee increasing your chances of getting cancer.’

A shooting pain seizes Penny’s heart.

‘I read it and laughed, thinking what bullshit, and went and made myself another cup.’

Penny almost laughs at her mother swearing like she’d always done. She’s barely uttered more than three words at a time over the past week.

Her mother looks up and meets Penny’s eyes. ‘It’s not so funny anymore.’ Her face is grim, nothing but sadness left.

‘It wasn’t the coffee,’ Penny urges.

‘Coffee was my thing,’ her mum says. ‘I love you girls but when you were young and it was just me looking after the both of you, coffee got me through the day.’