Nana dropped Cat’s hand and became instantly peremptory. “Calm down, Frank! There’s no need to behave like that. It’s life! Bad things happen!”

They all looked silently at the bruise across her face.

“Hello, Mrs. Kettle!” A nurse broke through their silence, breezing efficiency. “Lots of lovely visitors I see! And look at all those flowers!”

“My back is killing me,” said Nana.

“Well, let’s see what we can do to make you more comfortable. Perhaps you could all come back in a few minutes?”

The nurse looked at them brightly and firmly.

“We’ll go and get some lunch downstairs,” pronounced Lyn. “We won’t be long, Nana.”

“Take your time,” said Nana. “Don’t know about lovely visitors. You’re all such misery heads.”

Gemma went to put Sal in his pram.

“Let your father carry the baby.” Maxine’s eyes were on Frank.

“You want him, Dad?”

“What? Oh yes, of course.” He took the baby into his arms. “Hello, little mate.”

Cat looked at Sal in a bright orange romper suit, a chubby fist clinging to Frank’s shirt. It had become like an old sporting injury: this familiar, reflexive twinge of pain whenever she saw Sal.

“What did Dan want?” asked Lyn as the three of them walked ahead to the elevator.

“He got the job in Paris. He and Angela are going.”

Both Lyn and Gemma turned to look at her with stricken faces.

“I didn’t know,” said Gemma immediately. “Charlie never said anything.”

“You’re not responsible for everything Angela does,” said Cat.

“I thought—” Lyn bit her lip. “Sorry.”

“Yeah. I thought it too,” said Cat as the elevator bell dinged and their parents caught up with them. The doors closed, and Frank suddenly handed Sal over to Gemma and buried his face in his hands. His shoulders shook. It took Cat a confused second to realize that for the first time in her life she was seeing her father cry. He lifted his face and wiped the back of his hand across his nose. His mouth twisted with violent hatred. “I want to kill that bloke.”

At the exact moment that Dan and Angela’s flight was due to leave Sydney, Cat was heaving a giant green garbage bag of junk out onto her grandmother’s front porch, her nose twitching and eyes streaming from the clouds of dust.

Would they hold hands? Make nervous jokes about their new lives together as Sydney rolled away beneath them?

Cat and Maxine were cleaning out Nana’s house: the house she had lived in for over fifty years. Nana was moving into a “lifestyle resort exclusively for over fifty-fives.”

“Of course, it’s a retirement village,” said Nana, showing them the glossy brochure with its pictures of white-haired couples ecstatically clinking champagne glasses on their “spacious balconies.” “I’m not stupid. Full of silly old biddies. But I’ll feel a lot safer and really what do I need this big old house for? I don’t know why none of you ever suggested it. Probably worried about me spending your inheritance, I bet!”

The family heroically refrained from mentioning that they’d been suggesting it for the last ten years. Now, it was Nana’s idea—and an extremely clever and sensible one.

She had said from her hospital bed that she was too frightened to spend another night in that house alone.

“Of course not, Mum!” said Frank. “You can live with Max and me!”

Cat saw her mother’s eyes flicker, but Nana interrupted him. “Don’t be stupid, Frank. Why would I want to live with you? I want to live in a lifestyle resort.”

Since the attack, Nana Kettle seemed to have developed two conflicting new personality traits.

She had moments where she seemed to Cat heartbreakingly frail and frightened, like a child waking up still in the grips of a nightmare. Describing the attack, her voice would quiver with surprised tears. It was as if her feelings had been hurt. “He didn’t look at me,” she kept saying. “Did I mention that? He never once looked at me.” But at other times, she seemed sharper than ever before. She had a new way of lifting her chin, a determined new edge to her voice.

It helped perhaps that she had become something of a minor celebrity.

A story appeared in the Daily Telegraph with the headline OLYMPIC VOLUNTEER ATTACKED! Lyn had given them a photo she’d taken of Nana marching in the Volunteers’ Tickertape Parade. Nana grinned cheekily up from the page—a charming, innocent old lady who could recite all the words to The Man from Snowy River, whose husband was a World War II soldier!

Sydney threw up its arms in horror. Nana was inundated with letters of support, flowers, teddy bears, cards, checks, and close to a hundred brand-new cameras. People wrote letters to the paper and rang up talk-back radio stations. It was un-Australian, it was appalling, it was plain wrong.

The attacker was arrested after his girlfriend recognized the Identikit picture Nana had helped create. “When I saw that sweet little old lady in the paper, I just thought, Nah, that’s it,” said the girlfriend self-importantly to the television crews.

“Sweet little old lady, my foot,” said Maxine now, as she joined Cat out on the veranda, dragging another green bag of rubbish behind her. “She’s driving me up the wall.”

“Me too.” Cat wiped the back of her hand across her nose and looked down at her T-shirt and jeans. They were covered in dust.