I waded into the shallows, stooped with cupped hands and splashed my face. I pulled Harmony further into the water, took a breath that could have been of hot sand, and dived beneath, showing Harmony and her siblings how to do the same, and holding Isla beside me.

‘I can’t swim!’ Harmony cried.

I took her hands and sloshed ahead, feet sinking into the deep, warm mud. Holding her body close in a full-immersion baptism. ‘The water’s shallow. Wet your blanket. Hold it over you, like this.’

I remembered Jack with his goggles and mask. Why didn’t I own such items? Anyone could buy them. Leanne dived with the baby, who had given up screaming. Was he already dead?

We clung to life, sharing water with kangaroos and cattle.

And so we survived, waist deep in the warming, muddy water of the drying dam. Trees whose canopies usually spread like green fireworks against a blue sky now really were fireworks, rising orange and inflamed into the smoke. Wet blankets shielded us from further showers of embers. My previous concept of fire was controlled, golden. I’d been foolish. Fire, a mad red giant, spread its arms, stretched. It waltzed in delirium. Now reaching, now collapsing, now roaring.

Fire fronts would take a few minutes to pass. Surely this was long enough? This conflagration of bushes all around. This hot shower turned to hail – burning twigs and leaves pattering into the water. Now and then we ducked to dampen our hair and blankets. No sign of the fire easing.

Into this burning world, Leanne’s baby woke. He opened his mouth and screamed. I rested my arms around Leanne’s shoulders.

All the oxygen was sucked suddenly from the air.

I gasped. Harmony grabbed my hand and shuddered. Fire needs oxygen, too. And the fire was bigger than us, left nothing.

Was this, then, how it would end? Drowning in the open air, water up to our knees?

Caleb, where are you?

Harmony pulled my face down to her level. ‘Are we dying?’

What happened next? The fire decided, at random, that it had played with us enough. It moved on. Daylight came back suddenly, darkness blown away by the wind that changed the weather. It was like a fantasy or time travel story. We were taken to another world and then, just like that, we were back and it was afternoon in the dam, on the same day we had left. Oxygen eased back into the air. Miraculously, Leanne’s baby started to sob. We waited in the water. By the light of the flames, I checked my watch. It had stopped at 6 pm. Was that when we’d reached the water? Around us, the world was already dark. Was it night time? Had we already been here for that long?

Jack was on the road, I hoped, looking for Caleb and for us.

Jack Laskin was nothing like the other men I’d loved. The difference began with his faded jeans and old boots. Stephen was uncomfortable out of a business suit. And Marco Ossani – my own first love, as important to me as Penelope was to Caleb – sitting with me in long-ago art lectures while we developed passions for ancient archaeology and each other, had dressed in black, as if a prototype for Caleb’s gothic look.