When it was over, Emma lingered. She reached for a shovel but Kate took it from her. “This is the easy part. How about you go and shower and have something to eat?”

Emma’s red-rimmed eyes narrowed. “Are you sure?”

Kate nodded. “Definitely.”

When the grave was half-filled, with a heavy heart, Kate stopped her shovelling and raised her gaze to watch a colony of flying foxes soar overhead. A wicked, ominous feeling gripped her and she tried to squash it down. Returning to the high pile of soil, a flash of blue caught her eye. “Great,” she mumbled beneath her breath, as she watched Sister Ruth cross the dirt road, “Just what I bloody need…”

“Don’t you pull your back out again,” Sister Ruth warned as she approached.

“I’ve never pulled my back out.”

Beneath the plastic frames of Kate’s glasses, sweat had pooled on the bridge of her nose. She pulled the frames off and tossed them down to the clean grass.

“April,” Sister Ruth said, and Kate spared her a brief glance. Her sight impaired, Sister Ruth was nothing but a blur of blue in the moonlight. “I saw your Google search on the office computer,” Sister Ruth continued. “Exercises for back pain. You can’t get anything past me, so don’t be deceitful, Kate,” she said playfully.

“Deceitful?” Kate scoffed. She pressed her foot against the step of the shovel and collected a heavy mass of soil on the blade. “Maybe you should pass that line of advice over to St. Vincent’s.”

Kate heaved the mass of soil into the grave. Sister Ruth remained silent.

“It’s going to break Tilly’s heart when she realises she’s being used—when they get married and he just takes off.”

“Kate, the vicar told Sister Ellie in confidence. I can’t betray that.”

She swatted a mosquito from her forearm. Son of a bitch. “You encouraged Sister Ellie to betray Tilly—for him. We don’t even know him.”

She shovelled faster.

Sister Ruth cleared her throat. “The vicar is doing the right thing and we must have confidence in him. He’s a man of faith, Kate, a good man—”

“He’s an asshole.” With a grunt, she speared her shovel into the ground.

Silence.

Kate swiped the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. “I’m sorry, Reverend Mother.”

Sister Ruth crouched by the clean grass at the head of the grave. Calmly, she straightened the rose the girls had picked for Lockie. “We all know that you care very deeply for Tilly, Kate.”

Something in the Reverend Mother’s tone brought a flush of heat to Kate’s skin. “Yeah, well, she’s my friend.” Kate grunted with exertion as she filled the grave. “She deserves better. And you know what? I’m not so sure that I’m going to be able to keep quiet about this for much longer. I don’t owe the guy anything.”

“Kate…”

“I mean, Tilly almost took the wrong vows once, didn’t she? Now she’s doing it all over again.” She looked up, trying to focus on the pale blur that was Sister Ruth’s face. Even blind to her features, Kate could read the warning. She’d gone too far, said too much. Fuck it, she thought. It was time to be bold. To be brave. It was time to bury the reticence—including her own. “You know I’m gay, right?”