‘Are you going to meetings?’

‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘It’s meant to help. People say—’

‘Would you give it up? I know what people say.’

‘All right. I was trying to help.’

Her heart will not slow down. ‘I was about to start going to meetings in London,’ she says, just to test if her voice is working. ‘It wasn’t the best time for me to come out here.’

‘You’re doing pretty good, considering,’ he says. ‘Still got your temper.’

She laughs, because she knows he expects her to laugh.

‘Personally, I hardly touch the stuff,’ Scott says.

‘Well, aren’t you fucking perfect?’ She looks pointedly out the window, at the long grass and the stripped down cars at the side of the road.

‘Not really,’ he says. ‘And I’ll leave you out there with the roadkill if you’re going to be like that.’

‘Sorry.’ She looks back at him. ‘I haven’t told anyone else, that’s all.’

‘I care about you, Isla. You know?’

‘Yeah, I know that. I do.’ She shuts her eyes against the sun. ‘I think I started drinking so I could be closer to Dad. I didn’t want to disapprove of him. It made it easier to be on his side.’

‘That makes sense,’ Scott says.

‘Does it?’

‘Sure.’ He glares at a white ute that flies past them in the fast lane. ‘You were the only one who could calm him down. Can’t have been easy on you.’ He glances at her. ‘D’you remember?’

‘Some of it. The hardest thing about sobriety is remembering things I’d rather forget.’

‘Do you remember when he broke all the fingers in Mum’s hand?’

‘No.’ She thinks about it. ‘No, that was an accident. He slammed her hand in the door of the car.’

He makes a growl of disagreement in his throat. ‘He might have told you that.’

‘It was an accident. I remember he drove her to the hospital.’ She hears how this sounds. Her voice has a childish whine.

‘There were no accidents in our house,’ he says.

Isla sinks further into her seat. ‘You always think the worst of him.’

‘Jesus, Isla.’ He slows his speed at the Ropes Crossing turnoff. ‘I was the one who drove her to hospital when Dad was too far gone. One time he dislocated her shoulder. Another time he broke her ribs.’

She turns back to the window, stares out at the western suburbs. Street after street of fibro houses with steel fences. ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘I could go on,’ he says. ‘But I don’t want to knock you off the wagon.’

The sun is in their eyes as they head west. The road narrows. Isla wonders if her brother is as right as he thinks he is. If she has always been wrong. Her heart pounds.

‘How did you turn out so normal, anyway?’

He smiles and taps the steering wheel. ‘Therapy,’ he says. ‘Years of therapy. I recommend it.’

She waits, sensing there’s more.