Adelaide clasped her friend’s hand. ‘Netty, darling Netty, I know you mean well, but this is a shock. Ten years is a long, long time. I’m not the same person. If he is looking for a giddy seventeen-year-old willing to fall at his feet, then he is going to be sorely disappointed.’

‘If he truly loves you—’ Netty began but Adelaide gave a snort of laughter. ‘Why do you laugh?’ Netty sounded hurt. ‘He must love you still to cross the world to find you.’

‘There is that,’ Adelaide conceded. ‘But I’ve changed.’

‘And if he’d come six months ago it would be different, would it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘A certain handsome American doctor hadn’t come into your life then, had he? I’m no fool, Adelaide. There’s something between you and Caleb.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’ve known him barely three months. How long has Amos been courting you?’

‘That’s different,’ Netty said. ‘Caleb’s different.’

‘What am I going to do?’

‘At least let me go and see where he’s lodging. When you’re ready, you can face him on your own terms.’

Adelaide drew a long, steadying breath and unlocked the door to let Netty out. ‘Find out what you can but don’t let him see you. We can’t rely on him not recognising you a second time.’

‘I won’t. I’ll ask Amos what he knows.’

Peering around the door, Adelaide watched Netty cross the road, affecting a studious casualness.

Alone in the empty post office, Adelaide slid down the door, reaching for the locket that she had worn every day for the past ten years. But now it lay folded in a handkerchief in her top drawer, where she had placed it the day Caleb had kissed her and told her he wished to pay court to her.

She should be thrilled. The man she thought she had loved, the man she had thought dead for ten years—the father of her child—had come to find her.

Why was her first instinct to flee?

5 February 1872

Adelaide passed a sleepless night, her mind churning with imagined conversations with this ghost from her past.

She couldn’t hide. The post office had to be opened and at some point during the day he would walk through the door. She set herself to work but every time the bell over the door tinkled, she started.

‘Morning, missus,’ Amos Burrell said, dumping the mailbags on the counter, sending the neat rack of inked stamps flying. He stooped to pick up the fallen stamps, which he set back in their rack. ‘Didn’t mean to startle you.’

‘Not at all. I was … deep in concentration,’ Adelaide said. ‘What’s the news from Shady Creek?’

Amos shrugged. ‘Not sure I can add anything. Old Bowen’s dead—passed away on the Melbourne coach. Quite a shock to the other passengers, I can tell you.’