“That wasn’t fair, was it?” she kept saying to Susi, as if Susi were the referee, as if Perry were there listening to this independent arbiter.

“Do you think it was fair?” Susi would say, just like a good therapist should. “Do you think you deserved that?”

Celeste watched the man sitting to her right pick up his glass of water. His hand trembled even worse than hers, but he persevered on bringing it to his mouth, even as the ice cubes clinked and water slopped over his hand.

He was a tall, pleasant-looking, thin-faced man in his midthirties, wearing a tie under an ill-fitting red sweater. He must be another counselor, like Susi, but one who suffered a pathological fear of public speaking. Celeste wanted to put her hand on his arm to comfort him, but she didn’t want to embarrass him when he, after all, was the professional here.

She looked down and saw where his black trousers had ridden up. He was wearing light brown ankle socks with his well-polished black business shoes. It was the sort of sartorial mishap that would give Madeline a fit. Celeste had let Madeline help choose her a new white silk shirt to wear today, together with a pencil skirt and black court shoes. “No toes,” Madeline had said when Celeste had modelled the outfit with her choice of sandals. “Toes are not right for this event.”

Celeste had acquiesced. She’d been letting Madeline do a lot of things for her over the past year. “I should have known,” Madeline had kept saying. “I should have known what you were going through.” No matter how many times Celeste assured her that there was no possible way that she could have known, that Celeste would never have permitted her to know, Madeline had continued to battle genuine guilt. All Celeste could do was let her be there for her now.

Celeste looked for her friendly face in the audience and settled on a woman in her fifties, with a bright bird-like face, who was nodding along encouragingly as Susi did her introduction.

She reminded Celeste a little of the boys’ Year 1 teacher at their new school just around the corner from the flat. Celeste had made an appointment to see her before they started. “They idolized their father, and since his death, they’ve been having some behavioral issues,” Celeste had told her at her first meeting.

“Of course they have,” said Mrs. Hooper. She looked like nothing would surprise her. “Let’s have a weekly meeting so we can stay on top of this.”

Celeste had managed not to throw her arms around her and cry into her nice floral blouse.

The twins had not coped well over the past year. They were so used to Perry being gone for long periods that it took a long time for them to understand that he wasn’t ever coming home. They reacted like their father reacted when things went wrong: angrily, violently. Every day they tried to kill each other, and every night they ended up in the same bed, their heads on the same pillow.

Seeing their grief felt like a punishment to Celeste, but a punishment for what? For staying with their father? For wanting him to die?

Bonnie did not have to do jail time. She was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter by an unlawful and dangerous act and sentenced to two hundred hours of community service. In handing down his sentence the judge noted that the defendant’s moral culpability was at the lower end of the scale for this type of offense. He took into account the fact that Bonnie did not have a criminal record, was clearly remorseful and that, although it was possibly foreseeable that the victim would fall, this was not her intent.

He also took into account the testimony of expert witnesses who proved that the balcony railing was beneath the minimum height requirements of the current building code, that the bar stools were not appropriate for use on the balcony, and that other contributing factors included the weather, the consequent slipperiness of the railing and the intoxication of both the defendant and the victim.

According to Madeline, Bonnie had performed her community service with great pleasure, Abigail by her side the whole time.

There were letters going back and forth from insurance companies and lawyers, but it felt like something between all of them. Celeste had made it clear she wanted no money from the school and that she would be donating back any payouts she received to cover higher insurance premiums as a result of the accident.

The house and the other properties had been sold, and Celeste had moved the boys into the little apartment in McMahons Point and had gone back to work three days a week at a family law firm. She enjoyed the fact that she didn’t think about anything else for hours at a time.

Her boys were trust-fund kids, but their trust funds weren’t going to define them, and she was determined that Max and Josh would one day be asking, “Do you want fries with that?”

She’d also set up a trust fund of equal value for Ziggy.

“You don’t need to do that,” Jane had said, when she’d told her, over lunch at a café near Celeste’s apartment. She’d looked appalled, almost nauseous. “We don’t want his money. Your money, I mean.”

“It’s Ziggy’s money. If Perry knew Ziggy was his son he would have wanted him to be treated exactly the same as Max and Josh,” Celeste had told her. “Perry was—”

But then she’d found herself unable to speak, because how could she say to Jane that Perry was generous to a fault, and scrupulously fair. Her husband had always been so fair, except for those times when he was monstrously unfair.

But Jane had reached across the café table and taken her hand and said, “I know he was,” almost as if she did understand everything that Perry was and wasn’t.