Winters here were frosty and it sometimes snowed (although it never settled). Springs were pretty and autumns spectacularly beautiful, but it was summer when the weather became a reliable, predictable topic of conversation. This year, everything was dead. Even the gum trees, native to this drought-affected region, had given in to the season. Hot air sucked their oil into a coruscating haze around high, sparse leaves. Their trunks littered strips of bark. No matter how much time I spent raking bark and leaves that fell around the house, more fell and blew in to replace it.

Brunton appeared as on the map along a single road from Melbourne. The town was an ant farm of streets that led only into each other. The hotel’s white tower wavered, a mirage over the improbably wide Main Road, constructed in Gold Rush days by planners dreaming of an inland centre rivalling Paris. An unfinished boulevard, nearly as wide as it was long, ran to a parched paddock. Valleys and widely spaced mobile phone towers meant we were more remote than mere distance suggested. But despite the quiet-seeming road, a scattering of four-wheel drives proved the weather hadn’t kept all Melburnians away from the offer of free drinks at cellar doors, though they wouldn’t stay for long.

The town survived economically by virtue of prettiness and proximity to Melbourne. Visitors shopped for antiques while taking a break from wine-tasting. Retirees left city jobs to establish vineyards on the slopes of Setback Mountain, hiring architects to design cellar doors. Brunton generally had a freshly painted air and it had pleased me at first, this appealing town, this evidence of Stephen’s solid roots. It was what I wanted for my own life. But despite the charm, Brunton was shaded by disappointment. It wasn’t often featured in the news, and its history was small: a nineteenth-century settler bequeathed a hundred pounds for the cemetery gates; reclaimed from swamp, the oval flooded frequently. An abandoned train station confirmed that state planners once thought the town worth the connection, and that they thought so no longer. A line of empty car park spaces waited beneath eucalypts for customers of the newsagent or bread shop or the children’s clothing store Oh Baby Baby.

We passed the War Memorial and paused at the Caltex service station. On the other side of Main Road, glinting in the too-bright sunshine, were the windows of Doonan’s Hardware, where Caleb had had his first casual job. In Brunton, everyone was connected to everyone else: Darren Doonan was Rosie’s cousin. While I climbed from the car, Darren strode through his glass door, tattooed arms crossed over his chest, glaring. Surely it was the wrong time of day for the shadow I want to remember? The past is unknowable – our memories always distorted by what we feel, or by what we don’t. Darren’s hatred for Caleb was already an established fact. I looked back into the car. Had Caleb noticed him?

He pulled an earbud from one ear. ‘Everything all right, Mum?’