I looked out the window. Leonie had snapped at me but I didn’t feel like crying this time. I listened. And then I thanked her. I thanked her for picking me up out of the gully. For helping my family when she was well within her rights to just walk away.

Leonie turned her face to the side window. ‘You’re welcome,’ she said. ‘Thanks.’

As we drove through town, heading for Leonie and Basil’s house, the phone in my hand buzzed with a number I didn’t recognise. I answered it before I realised that it would be Mum, calling from the hospital bedside phone.

She still sounded croaky, but she leapt in straight away.

‘Are you okay honey? I just really need to know that you’re okay.’

‘I’m okay. I’m with Leonie and Basil. You should get some sleep, Mum. Let them look after you there and I’ll see you in the morning.’

‘Don’t take the pill, honey.’ She seemed to be struggling with her breath, though whether it was from the injury or from emotion, I couldn’t tell.

‘Um, I’m not really asking for people’s opinions –’

‘No, I just mean not yet, not tonight. Wait till you’re safe at home with me.’ Being safe at home with my mother was not a concept I was familiar with. ‘We’ll drive back home tomorrow and I’ll do everything to make sure it’s good, okay? I’ll look after you, I’ll be there for you. And if I’m not, if I let you down, then, well then, you can just do what you have to do and I’ll know I deserve it. I want us to do it together. I want you to be able to trust me.’

I thought about Geraldine not-medically speaking to me about taking the pill alone. And about second chances. Third chances. ‘Okay, Mum,’ I said. ‘I’m going to try trusting you. I’ll wait.’

‘Promise?’

‘I’m pinky-swearing with myself as we speak.’

Leonie and Basil watched as I crooked the phone in my shoulder and linked my two little fingers in front of my face.

‘It’s true, Cathy,’ Leonie said loudly from the front seat. ‘She’s doing it.’

‘We’re witnesses,’ hollered Basil.

I hung up the phone and I thought about Mum then. About her working away at her business, that business that took all of her time, that she was so focused on and that I resented the hell out of. And while all the time I had been thinking that she was just obsessed with success and earning money, she had been sending a chunk of her profits to a nursing home to get them to look after her brother. Doing all of that and never saying a word about it. Working herself insane so she didn’t have to think, didn’t have to remember. And then when she stopped working, tamping it all down with alcohol. I thought of her, this night, in the kitchen of the little house, turning and telling Hessel not to fucking touch her daughter, that she was going to report him for what he did to Danny, telling him she was going to tell the truth finally. Facing up to it all. I felt a small warm glow of pride growing. I had seen how afraid she was. That had taken some serious guts.