As Sister Ruth wound down the passenger window, the veil of her baby-blue habit fluttered in the cool October breeze. With a soft sigh, she returned her focus to her crossword puzzle. “You work so hard for those girls.”

Kate smiled. “So do you, Reverend Mother.”

Nearing seventy-five, Sister Ruth was like an Eveready battery. She was a wonderful headmistress and maths teacher—Kate could attest to that having once been her student. Although Sister Ruth had odd ideas and an even stranger manner of articulating those ideas, the students—the twenty-five boarders, especially—adored their principal like a grandmother.

Nine months before, when Kate had arrived to assume the year-long position of music teacher at St. Joan of Arc Catholic Girls’ School, Kate’s first impression of her former headmistress was that she seemed absolutely exhausted. One of the primary missions of The Daughters of Our Lady of Mercy was education of youth. If Kate had a dollar for every time she’d had to remind Sister Ruth that it wasn’t her job to bear that mission alone, she’d have accounted for her highly coveted salary. Now, nine months into her contract, Kate often found herself awake at night wondering why she had decided to share that mission at all.

The salary had been incredibly attractive—that was what she’d told her mother and sister. But the truth was that a position at St. Joan’s offered Kate an escape. If she could isolate herself on Lords, she couldn’t be tempted to spend nights in inner city Melbourne with Elodie, her kind and attentive and loyal ex who had simply envisioned a future different to the one Kate desperately wanted—a future including children. If she relocated to Lords and took on the position of housemother from Monday to Friday, the breakup would finally be final—and they could both move on. And that was exactly what had happened—they hadn’t spoken in six months.

Initially, she’d reluctantly relocated to Lords with a negative mindset. Knowing what her peers had been like at St. Joan’s in the early noughties, she had thought her decision might prove to be a nightmare. But in the decade since Kate’s graduation, the school had fostered a much more sisterly atmosphere. Kate was pleasantly surprised to find that these girls were decidedly less entitled than they had been, that the select twenty-five students who now boarded—just as Kate once had—lived almost as simply as the sisters residing in the convent beside the boarding house.

As housemother, the only noteworthy meltdown Kate had witnessed had occurred the previous month. During a ferocious storm, the Telstra tower had been struck, severing telecommunications for the entire island, including the pioneer village that sat at the edge of the two-lane causeway on the other side of Lords. With the Internet down, all hell had broken loose. Without Wi-Fi—Netflix, Instagram, Facebook—it seemed that Kate had Lucifer’s progenies on her hands. She didn’t have enough fingers to count how often one of the girls had stepped into her office and made a case to return to the mainland. Lexi, of course, had been first.