“Georgie, is everything okay with the baby?” her brother asks.

Oh, God, she’s forgotten about the baby.

“Georgie, is everything okay with the baby?” he repeats.

She manages a nod and Dominic gently pulls her up. He looks so sad; she can see that in this afternoon light.

“Georgie. You have to get out of bed.”

It’s the same voice she remembers from her childhood. The one of authority.

“Later.” She says it in a whisper.

“She’ll get out of bed later,” she hears Tom say. “She’s fine. Let her sleep.”

“No. Now, Georgie,” Dom says firmly.

She doesn’t move. Tom’s right. She’ll get out of bed later.

“Georgie, I have to go to my AA meeting and I need you to come with me, now. I can’t do this on my own.”

“I’ll look after her,” Tom’s saying, panic in his voice. “She’ll get out of bed later. Don’t bully her.”

She feels Dominic’s hands cup her face. “Please, Georgie. I need you to come with me. I can’t do this on my own.”

After the meeting, down at the Stanmore Community Hall, Dom sits with her in the park.

“What happened?” he asks her quietly.

She shakes her head and closes her eyes, and the tears are there.

“Just a bad day.” Her voice has no volume, no energy. “Where’s Sam?”

She knows she’s asked that same question a few times now. She remembers that he’s answered, but she can’t remember what the answer is.

“In Melbourne for work. Come on, Georgie. What sent you over the edge?”

She can see her house from where they sit. She’s left the light on in her room and she wants to go back there and shut the door.

“Did I not go to work today?”

“It’s Saturday. You didn’t go yesterday. Talk to me, Georgie, or I’ll have to take you to Lucia’s.”

There’s panic in his voice.

“I got an e-mail the other day,” she says. “From Ana Vanquez.”

He thinks for a moment. “Joe’s girl?”

She nods.

“And I was happy for her, honest I was, Dom. She had written to me a while back and told me about this lovely man she had met back in Spain and now they’re having a . . .”

She can’t say the words and he tries to put his arm around her, but she doesn’t want it there. Why is it that Sam’s the only one who understands that she doesn’t want arms placed around her every time she wants to talk? That every time arms are placed around her, she stops talking.

“I just want him back, Dom,” she sobs. “Why can’t we have him back? Why can’t that baby be his? It should be his!”

He nods. At least family members don’t use shit clichés.

“She wants me to tell Mummy and Bill . . . but I can’t.”

“I will.”

She lays her head on his shoulder and closes her eyes.

“Can I love my baby if I loved Joe?” she whispers.

“Oh, God, Georgie. Don’t even ask that.”

They sit for a while and she hears the sprinklers come on illegally in someone’s backyard. She reaches over and takes his hand, because he seems to be in another miserable world.

“You and Jacinta? Is it worse than I think it is?” she asks.

He doesn’t respond.

“She told me you were in contact six months ago,” Georgie continues. “And that she lets you speak to Anabel, but not to her just yet.”

He laughs, bitterly.

“I’d been sober for two minutes, and thought I could just drive up there and collect them.”

There’s more silence and she squeezes his hand.

“Do you know what she said?” he asks.

Georgie shakes her head.

“‘Returning home is my decision to make, Dom,’ she said. ‘Not yours. And if you come and get me, I’ll never forgive you. If you take this decision away from me like you did before, I’ll never forgive you for Tom.’”

Georgie watches as he focuses on the merry-go-round in front of them. She shivers. It always looks creepy at night without kids playing on it.

“And I didn’t get what she meant,” he says. “At first I thought it was about me walking out on Tom six weeks after she took Anabel away. I thought it was about the drinking, but then something told me that it was more than that. And I’ve spent this whole time trying to work it out. How far back do I go?”

His head is in his hands and sometimes he’s muffled and she has to lean closer to hear him.

“And I went all the way back to when we were twenty,” he says, his voice still bitter. “Four generations of housing commission and welfare, and Jacinta Louise, the wonder girl, wins a scholarship to Sydney Uni from the western suburbs of Brisbane, and two and a half years in, I get her pregnant.”

“Oh, Dom, don’t do this,” Georgie mutters.

“I remember the look on her parents’ faces when they drove down. Shit, Georgie. She was one of five girls to make it to Year Eleven at her school, because everyone else got knocked up or were off their faces on drugs by the time they were fourteen. Even the nuns wouldn’t let her out of their sight. And I swore to them all, on my family’s honor, that I wouldn’t let her drop out of uni and that I’d take care of everything. For years people would go on about how I threw it in so my wife could finish her degree. I was Mr. Wonderful.”

He shakes his head with disbelief.

“You know what I think, Georgie? That I wanted to throw it in. And worse still, she didn’t want all that. Not with a baby on the way. We made the plans, but no one asked Jacinta Louise what she wanted. What if all she wanted was to be at home with her boy?”

He looks at her for the first time, his expression so pained as he rubs his hands over his mouth. “While I was telling her to get the baby on the bottle because it wouldn’t work if she was still breastfeeding him. So it makes sense that six months ago, she’s crying on the phone, Georgie, and I heard the anger when she said, ‘If you take this decision away from me, like you did before, I’ll never forgive you for Tom.’”

Georgie closes her eyes. She wants to be one of those ventriloquist dolls and have someone put the right words in her mouth.

“Okay,” she acknowledges. “Maybe. But she’s my best friend, Dom, and we’ve covered every conversation there is to cover over the last twenty-two years. Believe me, I know things about your sex life that I should not know.”

He glances at her and she almost laughs at the look of horror.

“But Jacinta’s said it to me before. That she was never happier than the time when we all lived in that dump in Camperdown after Tommy was born. And how your uni mates couldn’t grasp the fact that you weren’t studying law anymore and they spent most of their time with us in that mad house listening to Joy Division and the Pretenders and drinking and having arguments about politics and religion, and how we’d watch Rage every Sunday morning and then we’d wrap up Tommy and go to Mass. And if it wasn’t for the fact that she hadn’t met Anabel Georgia yet, she’d want to go back to those years and not move an inch. Because she had her gorgeous boy and you.”

She presses a kiss to his arm. “Jacinta loved that she got to use her brains, Dom, and she loved that Tom and you were inseparable for those years. ‘Better than men who don’t get to know their kids,’ she’d say. Don’t take that away from yourself just because of what’s happened in the last two years.”

He’s still stooped over and she puts her arms around his back and leans her head against him. They stay like that for a while.

“So what’s the deal with you and Sam?” he asks later.

“So what is the deal with me and Sam?” she asks tiredly. “Are you shocked?”

“Who wouldn’t be? It’s amazing.”

“The baby?”

“No. I just can’t get over your boobs.”

She laughs and sits up, looking down at them.

“Aren’t they fantastic? B cup and growing.”

“You don’t get to keep them. You know that, don’t you, G?”

And then she’s laughing some more, because that’s the closest she’s got to hearing Dominic’s real personality. The dry drawl in his voice. The shit-stirrer extraordinaire.