She was dead tired by the time she arrived home. After the food tech class, she’d been pulled into a meeting with the head of the English department who wanted to plan the Year Nine excursion for early next year, which Andrea thought really could have waited until January. And then she’d begun marking the history assignments, which started off so promising with a well-thought-out piece from Rashida Hamdi but immediately took a turn for the worse when she moved on to Jessica Kingston, and it had been progressively more disappointing from there. It was funny how often kids thought she was out to get them when she gave them a poor mark, when in reality she wanted nothing more than for them to succeed. She wanted every one of these assignments to be well thought out, well-researched, well-written, kick-ass commentaries on ‘The role of Nicholas II in the collapse of the Romanov Dynasty’. Because then it would mean she was reaching them, that they were listening in class, that they cared. Instead she was dishing out marks that barely scraped by as a pass.

She was so tired that she almost didn’t go to check on apartment 5A. The last few days everything had been fine, so maybe it was better to leave them be, and besides, Tony hadn’t been too keen on her interfering. But at the last minute she felt a wave of guilt. What if everything wasn’t fine? What if she didn’t check and something happened? So, she headed down the hall past her own apartment door to 5A.

The funny thing was, in this type of apartment block, in this part of Sydney, you never would have imagined anything close to what was taking place behind the door of 5A. And yes, it might have been classist of Andrea to assume these problems only happened in lower socio-economic areas, but it had still shocked her when she’d seen what was going on.

The apartments here cost at least five times the amount she would have been able to afford had it not been for Tony. The real estate brochure had described their home as ‘an executive haven of total opulence with show-stopping 180-degree harbour views and grand scale proportions’.

Andrea still remembered poring over the photos and feeling a heady combination of disbelief, desire and nausea. The sprawling balcony with porcelain tiles. The double-height ceilings and the gourmet stone kitchen. The herringbone timber floors and the plush bedroom carpet. And downstairs, a huge, sparkling swimming pool with an infinity edge, overlooking the harbour. She desperately wanted to live there, of course she did; it was stunning and luxurious. Never in her wildest dreams would she have envisioned one day living in a place like this. But wasn’t it too much for one couple? Too indulgent? Too extravagant?