Of course, that was when she was still carrying her baby like a magical talisman.

“Next year,” she’d said to Dan as she sighed with the comfort of cool sheets and a pillow. “We could have a Kettle-free Christmas. We could go away somewhere. Just us and the baby.”

“That sounds like a perfect Christmas,” he’d said. “I’ll come to bed soon. I’m going to walk off some of Lyn’s cooking.”

He’d kissed her on the forehead like a child, and Cat fell immediately into a dreamless sleep.

And then he’d spoken to someone for nearly half an hour, till past midnight.

It could be anybody of course. It could be a friend. It could be Sean, for example. It was probably Sean.

Although his conversations with Sean were always short and to the point. They weren’t chatters, Sean and Dan. Yeah, mate. No, mate. See you at three then.

Maybe they had long, meaningful, sharing-their-feelings conversations when Cat wasn’t around.

She looked back through the bill for other calls to the same number.

It appeared eight times in December. Most of them long conversations. Many of them very late at night.

On the first of December, there was an hour-long call at eleven o’clock in the morning.

That was the day after Cat found out she was pregnant. It was when she would have been at Lyn’s place, looking after Maddie.

She’s pregnant. I can’t leave her now.

No. It would be Sean. It would be a work friend. It could even be Dan’s sister, Melanie. Melanie. Of course it was Mel. Of course.

Cat stood up, walked to the phone, and dialed the number, and found she was breathing in exactly the same way as when she forced herself to sprint up that killer hill by the park. Frantic little gulps for air.

The phone rang once, twice, three times. Cat wondered if she was having a heart attack.

It switched to voicemail.

A bubbly girl’s voice spoke clearly and sweetly into Cat’s ear, in the tone of a special friend who is so sorry she’s missed you: “Hi! This is Angela. Leave me a message!”

She hung up, hard.

Gotcha.

Scrape and twist of the key in the lock. He walks into the kitchen with plastic bags of shopping hanging from his wrists.

She waits till he dumps them on the bench. Then she stands in front of him and puts her hands flat against his chest and automatically he links his hands behind the small of her back, because this is the way they stand. This is what they do. Her hands here and his hands there.

She looks at him. Full in the face. Right in the eyes.

He looks at her.

And there it is. She wonders how she missed it and for how long.

He’s already gone. He’s already looking back at her, politely, coolly, a little sadly, from some other place far off in the future.

He’s gone.

Just like her baby.

Heads or Tails, Susi?

Do I have a problem with gambling? No! I’ve got a problem with winning! Ha! That’s a joke I heard once. I don’t know if I told it right, though. It’s not really that funny.

So, you want to know about the first time I gambled. Yeah, I remember. It was Anzac Day and I was sixteen. I was down at the Newport Arms. You know, it’s the one day of the year you’re allowed to play two up until midnight. It’s legislated! Only in Oz, eh?

It’s a good atmosphere in the pubs on Anzac Day. A lot of old codgers. And you’ve got this big, excited circle of people standing around a guy in the middle, who tosses the coins. He’s normally a bit of a performer. He uses a special little wooden stick and the coins go spinning up into the sky and everybody looks up and watches them come down. The way it works is everybody bets with one another. You just hold up your money in the air and call out ten on heads, or whatever.

It was the first 2-Up game I’d ever seen, so I was watching for a while, seeing how it worked. I was mostly watching these girls, ’cos they were pretty easy on the eye. They were there with their grandpa, I think, they called him Pop. He was wearing one of them old-fashioned hats. He called them all “Susi” for some reason. They were all four putting away the beer. Jeez, were they into the game! They bet on every toss and they’d be yelling out, just like the men, “Head ’em up!” or “Tail ’em up!”

When one of them won, their grandfather would do a little old-fashioned dance with them. Like a waltz. Just a couple of little steps whirling them around. And then they’d be back, holding up their cash, yelling and laughing, giving each other high fives.

So finally I got up the guts to have a go. Bet five bucks on tails and won. I was hooked. Mate, I loved it. I can still see those coins flipping and turning in the moonlight and those three girls jumping up and down and hugging their grandpa.

Oh, yeah, I was hooked. Big time.

CHAPTER 15

The first time it happened, she was driving out of the Chatswood Shopping Center parking lot.

Maddie was in the back, silently strapped into her car seat, her thumb in her mouth, one finger locked around her nose. Lyn could see her accusing eyes in the rearview mirror. They weren’t talking to each other after a particularly horrible experience in the bookstore.

Maddie had spotted a copy of her favorite bedtime book in the children’s section and grabbed it triumphantly off the shelf.

“Mine!”

“No, Maddie, it’s not yours. Yours is at home. Put it back.”

Maddie looked up at Lyn as if she were nuts. She shook the book vigorously at her, eyes blazing righteously. “No! Mine!”