She knew it was always good at the start of a relationship, but was it always this good?

Yes, probably.

“No sticky date pudding,” she said sadly, looking at the menu. “It’s gone out of fashion.”

“We should make our own,” Charlie said. “Let’s make a sticky date pudding together tomorrow night. Not that you’ll be any help. But you can stand around and look pretty and pass me things.”

“First I have to see my sister. I have to fix things.”

“I’m sure it’s not your fault.”

“Well. It is a little bit.”

“Do you fight a lot? Do triplets fight more than normal?”

“The Kettle triplets do. But I don’t think we’re normal. Mum used to take us to a club for triplets when we were little and some of them adored one another. We were so disgusted, we threw rocks at them.”

“Little savages.” Charlie stroked her wrist with his thumb.

“We got expelled from the Triplet Club for a whole month. Do you fight with your sisters? When I was little I used to have fantasies about having a big brother.”

“My sisters would have paid you to take me. I used to beat them up. I specialized in vicious Chinese burns.”

“No!”

“Yep. Then I went through my juvenile-delinquent stage and ignored them.”

Gemma was rather aroused at the thought of Charlie as a juvenile delinquent. She imagined him in a black leather jacket, striding in slow motion down a dimly lit street.

“Then once I got bored with delinquency, I suddenly became friends with them. It was nice. Like getting bonus friends overnight. Now we give each other relationship advice.”

“Really. What do they tell you?”

“Oh stupid things, of course. I don’t listen to them. But I give them very wise advice.”

“Like what?”

“Well, the other day one sister happily announced she’s seeing a married man, for Christ’s sake. So my advice was to stop it.”

“Oh, very wise. It might be a bit more complicated than that.”

“It’s not.” Charlie was looking around for the waitress. “Why are these women all avoiding eye contact with me do you think?”

“My sister fell in love with a married man. It was their destiny to be together. His ex-wife was a witch.”

“Mmm,” began Charlie disapprovingly, when a waitress finally appeared, fumbling in her apron for a pen.

“Before we order you have to tell us what happened to your sticky date pudding. My girlfriend is still recovering from the shock.”

The sweet, teenage pleasure of hearing herself described as Charlie’s girlfriend made her forget all about defending Lyn’s destiny.

It was 3 A.M. that same night and Gemma burst gasping into consciousness, as if she’d been drowning in a deep, dark pool of sleep.

She’d forgotten something. Something very important.

What could it be?

Then it hit her and she screamed, “Charlie!”

He woke with a gasp and leapt straight out of bed, bouncing on his toes like a boxer, jabbing wildly at the air around him. “What? Where? Stay back!”

Gemma rolled out of bed, her legs trembly with fear. “We forgot! Charlie, how could we!”

She ran to the chest of drawers and began scrabbling wildly through her clothes, throwing them on to the floor. “We forgot we had a baby! We left it in the drawer!”

It would be too late. The baby would be dead. Babies needed food, or milk, or something! She imagined a tiny, shriveled-up corpse with accusing eyes. How terrible. How could they have forgotten? They were murderers.

Charlie was behind her, enfolding her in his arms. “We don’t have a baby, you fruitcake,” he said. “Come back to bed. It’s just a dream.”

“No, no.” She opened a new drawer. “We have to find our baby.”

But even as she was saying the words she was starting to doubt herself. Maybe there was no baby?

She turned to face Charlie. “We don’t have a baby?”

“No, we don’t have a baby. It’s a dream. Jesus. You frightened the hell out of me.”

“Sorry.” Now she felt a bit stupid. “Did I tell you that I sometimes have nightmares?”

“No, you didn’t.” He put his arm around her shoulders and guided her back toward the bed. “Just as a matter of interest, how often do you have them?”

CHAPTER 8

“This is going to sound bad,” said Dan, with the courageous expression of a bloody-lipped boxer stumbling back to his feet for another round. “But I sort of—forgot.”

“You forgot you slept with my sister.”

“I forgot.”

“You forgot.”

“Yes.”

“How is that possible?” Cat felt insulted on Lyn’s behalf. “She lost her virginity to you!”

“I hadn’t even thought about it for years,” confessed Dan, “until Annie asked. All I remembered was going out with her a few times. But if Lyn says we did, then we did. I wouldn’t argue with Lyn. She probably records every shag on a spreadsheet.”

Cat refused to smile.

“I was young, I got around. It feels like another world.”

“You still get around.”

He flinched and took it like a man.

Cat believed him. He could remember rugby league grand final scores from fifteen years ago and quote whole slabs of Simpsons dialogue, but his memory of personal events was notoriously shocking. It hadn’t mattered before. If this revelation had come before Angela (long black hair tumbling, black bra strap sliding, stop it, stop it, stop it) maybe she would have laughed. Yes, she probably would have laughed. She would have exaggerated her shock, milked it, but not really cared, because she took Dan’s faithfulness for granted. Everything else in her life could and probably would go wrong, but she thought she and Dan were a given.