The table was sticky where someone had spilled a drink. She budged up to the far end of the seat where the table was cleaner and waved away the flies that circled overhead. She stirred her drink with the straw and took a sip. Someone shouted out an order from the bar and she jumped, nearly choking, and thumped herself on the chest until she got her breath back. Her heart raced.

It wasn’t working out how she’d hoped. Steve wasn’t moving on from it. If he hadn’t seen her with Joe, if he’d found out some other way, he might have been able to box it away. Instead he was letting it eat at him. Brooding in the house like a caged bear. He could hardly look at her.

The baby was their only hope. He gave shape to the days, forced them out of bed, gave them something to talk about. She must be the last person on earth to catch on that babies were the glue for a marriage. Someone they could both love. And they did both love him. The kind of love you don’t recover from, that flips between joy and fear. She’d been wrong, thinking she didn’t have it in her to love a child. And she’d fallen harder because she hadn’t seen it coming.

She managed half of the malted shake and decided to leave the rest. It was hot in here, despite the ceiling fans, and she couldn’t relax. The flies were insistent, gathering at the far end of the table where the spilled drink had hardened. She swiped at one of them, hit it mid-flight, and her hand fizzed with the impact of its small, hard being, the brush of its wings.

A decision had formed in her head by the time she reached the bus stop. She would tell Steve they should move south, like he’d suggested. She’d send the new address to her dad once they’d found somewhere. It was never going to sit easy that he’d cut her off, that he was on his own in that old house on the edge of Toowoomba with only the chooks for company. But she had to pick herself up and concentrate on her marriage. She took the bus up to the end of Bay Street instead of walking the last stretch as she did most days. She’d be back in time to see William as he woke from his nap. He wanted her these days, when he woke. He held his arms up and reached for her. She curved her arm against her body, anticipating his weight.

David Walker was practising his violin again, sending his plangent notes down Bay Street, along the parched hedges and lawns, over the shadecloths in Doug’s front yard. The weatherboard houses on the ocean side of the street were looking dirty in the morning sun. It was the water restrictions, she figured. Nobody wanted to fill a bucket and scrub the boards down, not in this heat. Even Doug’s house had a tide of grit under the window. His roses were doing well, but. She nodded hello at him, standing out the front with his shears, like always. Across the street, the new house was nearly finished, three doors along from the Walkers’. It was twice the size of her place. Two storeys and a space at the side for a private garage. Parking on the street wasn’t good enough for some people.