As it turned out, they found two teeth and a wedding ring, but if the lack of bones raised an eyebrow, it wasn’t high enough to stop Rosemary being officially declared dead.

‘We take our break at three,’ one of the other cleaners told the Courier. ‘Thank God we were all together in the crib room,’ which was about as far away from what they called the garage as you could get—though of course they were not all together.

‘She kept herself to herself a bit,’ they said.

Sergeant Scanlan’s guess had been correct: the fire was started by a cigarette, or by the match that lit a cigarette (the newspaper was vague, and people weren’t that interested). There was insurance. Building would be done, new sweepers and trucks bought and stored in a safer space. The factory would make less chocolate for a while, but it would go on to make more than it had before. How and when this would be managed would not rustle newsprint while there were better details to be pecked at.

TWO LIVES LOST IN FIRE was Monday’s headline. Everybody knew about the first, but they paid the cover price to read about the second. Local woman Rosemary Lamb was seven months pregnant.

In the photograph Eddie gave them, Rosemary is pushing her hair up out of her eyes, squinting in the bright light of a late winter’s afternoon. She is smiling straight into the lens, her shoulders cocoa-coloured and her cheeks a little sunburned. There is nothing to tell it in the background, but I know—because I took the photograph—that she is standing outside a bar where she will go on to dance with cowboys on a floor of crackling peanut shells.

When it was decided by those who make such clear decisions, that there would be no more of Rosemary to lay to rest, the Courier was tasked with inviting all her friends and family to a service at the Baptist church on Lakeview. There would be a tree planted afterwards. What sort of tree, I wondered, and who made that decision? Rosemary loved golden wattle, and the snapped-leaf smell of peppermint gums, but I don’t know that anyone else knew that.

Early on the evening of the night before, I went over to the Lambs’ cabin to sit on the steps where I’d so often sat beside Rosemary or watched from a distance while she lost herself in a book, or bent to paint her toenails. I wanted the company of where-she’d-been; the shade of how it felt when I was with her.

When Sonny died, I felt I’d lost all that I’d ever been. My strings were cut, and I collapsed. I could not stand without him.

But it was different after Rosemary.

I had been left behind, but I had not been left. She had not taken with her the blue of the sky. She had splashed colours that would not wash away, and left choice on my table like a dice in a cup.

Your turn next.

Words I fingered like shells in my pocket.

The timber was warm beneath my bare feet. The sun had poured most of its colour down behind the trees and the mozzies were out. Perhaps I was half-expecting Eddie; it was that time of the afternoon, though he’d spent a lot of nights at his mother’s. I’d been avoiding him, afraid I might give something away under cross-examination, but what was there for him to question? As each day passed, I’d come to breathe a little easier, so I did not scurry home when I heard a car approaching. I waited on the step and watched as it swung an arc of light around the clearing and parked with its back to me, its single occupant as still as stone for minutes behind the wheel.

It wasn’t Eddie’s car. It wasn’t Eddie.

The door opened slowly, and bright sneakers at the end of dark blue jeans tapped the ground as if testing its stability. Rosemary’s mother hadn’t changed much in the years that she’d been gone, and I recognised her profile even in the gloom.

Joanna Cole had always been a woman who turned the heads of other women’s men. Her clothes were ironed, buttons carefully left undone. Pendants rested low. She wore make-up and earrings and highlights in her hair, but she couldn’t hide the furrow on her brow that wondered who I was and what I was doing on this deck that wasn’t mine. She didn’t know me, and I felt myself sit up just a little bit straighter because of that.

‘Eddie not here?’ she called out.

I shook my head.

She wandered a little, here and there, around and about, and eventually came close enough to share her thoughts.

‘By God, this place hasn’t changed.’ She squinted at her watch and then noticed the day’s paper on the step beside me, folded to page five, where there was a short piece covering the details of the next day’s service. It was the same picture of Rosemary they printed every time.

Joanna picked it up, and she looked at that photograph for long minutes—for all the time it took Eddie’s car to pull in next to hers, and all the time it took him to join us on the deck.

‘Not like you to be on time,’ he said.

They exchanged a weak hug. Brief and broken by limp pats on shoulders.

‘Eddie, love.’

‘How’ve you been, Jo?’

‘I spoke to her just last month,’ she said quietly. ‘I didn’t imagine anything like this would …’ She didn’t have to finish the sentence.

‘She didn’t say she’d spoken to you.’

‘No, I don’t suppose she did. How are you coping?’ she asked, but Eddie didn’t answer.

‘You remember Meg?’ he said instead.

‘Yes, we’ve met before.’ A tight smile, a sharp nod, and I felt my shoulders soften.

‘She was a good friend of Rosemary’s.’

A look of surprise swiftly covered.

I began to stand, but Eddie put a hand on my shoulder and pressed me gently back towards the step, wanting company or a witness or just help to dilute the conversation. I didn’t know how well he knew Joanna, but I knew he didn’t like her very much.

She returned to the newspaper while Eddie took the key from under the lavender and disappeared into the house. He didn’t ask if she wanted a glass of wine, so she couldn’t say No, thank you. It gave him something to do. It would give them something to set between them in place of the woman who would have filled that space.

‘So, you were friends?’ she asked.

I nodded.

‘Close?’ She turned to look at me, trying to test the depth of my friendship with her daughter, needing me to confirm it with a password, a wink, or a coded handshake.

‘Very.’ Only one word, but with it a flush of pride as blue as a ribbon.

Eddie wouldn’t be long inside. She had maybe two minutes, not enough time to cast a line and reel it slowly. She had to ask outright.

‘Is she really dead?’

Until then, I was beginning to think Rosemary might have hitchhiked all the way to Melbourne, a daughter drawn back beneath her mother’s wing.

‘They found her teeth,’ I told Joanna.

‘I know that,’ she said, ‘but they didn’t find anything else, did they?’ She smoothed the newspaper in her lap like a napkin in a fancy restaurant.

‘Her wedding ring.’

Joanna gave a snort like a horse impatient with its saddle. ‘And that’s all you’re going to tell me.’

I thought about giving her more, but I didn’t know that she deserved it, and I’d promised Rosemary I would keep her secret. Keep her safe.

‘That’s all there is,’ I said.

‘Ah, but is it?’ She drew a thick breath slowly as though sucking through a filter and she held it, and my eye, for a long, still while.

My brother and I used to fill boring waits with stares, unblinking across bus seats, church pews, and dinner tables. All siblings know the prickle of dry eyes. I held my breath as Joanna held her own, and I cleared my head so she could not see inside me.

Her eyes were more green than brown, and quite beautiful, though I’d never noticed before. I’d never looked; if I ever had she would have looked away. But I remembered the sketch on Rosemary’s wall, Joanna’s angles softer than they were in real life. ‘She wasn’t that much of a looker,’ Eddie had said, but she was.

Eventually, she exhaled sharply, as if to snuff the candles on a cake.

That’s that then.

‘She didn’t really belong here, did she?’ She didn’t expect me to answer, but I wanted to. I wanted her to understand she wasn’t even close to knowing all there was to know about her daughter.

‘She made it feel like home,’ I said.

Eddie banged back through the screen door and handed us each a glass of Rosemary’s wine. Chateau la Boîte.

They exchanged facts—traffic, weather, real estate—and then, ‘Why are you here, Joanna?’

I was wondering the same, but grief made Eddie bold. Why had she wanted to meet him here at Magpie Beach? Why not pay her respects with everyone else at the ceremony tomorrow?

‘Honestly, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I just wanted to see …’ Another broken sentence. ‘I’m sorry.’ It was thicker than sorry for dragging him all the way out here for no real reason, and I wondered what it was exactly she was sorry for. There were so many stages for her to regret.

‘Do you want to go inside?’ Eddie asked, nodding back towards the door he’d not long come out of. ‘Do you want to look at her things?’ It sounded watery. ‘You can have a wander round if you like,’ flicking limp fingers towards the shed, the barbecue, the rocky path down to the compost bin.

‘If I’d known …’

If ifs and ands were pots and pans, there’d be no need for tinkers. Perhaps I said it out loud, because both Eddie and Joanna were looking at me once I’d thought it.

Joanna shook her head, pulled her lips into her mouth, then ran a hand through her hair in a manner that was every bit her daughter’s. ‘I really am sorry.’

Eddie dug a booted toe into the ground. ‘I know you are.’

She set her glass on the newspaper and centred a bracelet on her wrist as she stood to leave. Fumbling for something to say, she double-checked the time of the service, and then she apologised one last time, but it was puddle-shallow now. ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’ His loss. She reached out and cupped his cheek briefly in the palm of her hand. He did not lean into her touch, and perhaps that cut it short, but he walked her to her car and waited while she climbed inside and wound the window down. She trapped his hand beneath hers on the window lip, as if she had something she wanted still to say but wasn’t sure whether, or how, to say it.

‘It’ll all work out,’ she said finally, patting and releasing his hand. ‘For you, I mean.’

There was a whoosh of aircon as the engine started, and a whine as the window glided closed. Keen wheels spun slightly, and she was gone.

I followed Eddie into the kitchen, where he apologised for the dishes in the sink, the milk carton on its side on the table, and the cat’s bowl which was a scribble of ants. He took the glass from my hand and refilled it from the box on the counter. I didn’t remind him to put it back in the fridge.

Rosemary was everywhere: rings and hair ties on the windowsill; notes and quotes dragging magnets down the fridge, and a list of names I doubted had been for the baby (Barney, Edward, Lucy, Zak); a gossipy magazine folded back on itself. I couldn’t place the actor in the story, though his face was familiar enough. Rosemary would have known him and every movie he’d ever been in, who he was married to, and what he was reported to be like ‘in real life’. ‘You know this one, Meg. Think!’ she would have said to me, as if it were important. She’d have fed me clues until I had the taste of an idea and told her he was the astronaut or the baseball player or the murderer-after-all, and that would have been enough for her to hand me his name like a little trophy.

‘I’m sorry too,’ I said.

‘I know you are, love.’ Eddie sucked his teeth and widened his eyes to keep himself from crying, but still the tears spilled through his lashes. ‘But don’t be,’ he said. ‘Be glad you knew her. She loved you, you know.’

I covered my ears with my hands because I didn’t want to hear any more.

‘This’ll need returning.’ I saw his lips move as he handed me the book: What to Expect When You’re Expecting. Slow breaths and years of habit led me to flick through the pages, and I caught Rosemary’s bookmark as it slipped. It was an old postcard, its colours faded and corners brittled by time, but I recognised the pale stone building in the photograph, the rack of pillars at its entrance, and the tall clock tower. I knew where the card had come from, if not who’d sent it, and I slid it back inside the book before Eddie might notice and want to keep it for himself.

He sat down with a sigh. ‘She’d have been a great mum, you know.’

I knew.

‘Not like …’

So many sentences never need be tidied shut. I nodded and sat down beside him.

‘She nearly left once, you know,’ he said quietly, and my heart froze. It was a thoughtful look he gave me. Deliberating: would he say what he was about to, or would he keep it to himself? There was wondering in it, and I didn’t want it out loud.

Keep it, I pleaded silently. Please keep it.

He looked down at the stubby in his hand and scratched at its label with a thumbnail.

‘She came to our place really late one night,’ he began, and confusion must have flickered on my face. ‘Joanna,’ he said, and I let my breath go quietly.

‘Before Rosemary was born,’ he went on. ‘We still had the farm. I must have been nine or ten. Mum and Jo were best friends back then. Our families were really close. We used to go camping together. Shane and me were fast asleep, and there was this hammering on the front door. I remember getting up and looking down the passage, and there was Aunty Jo, crying on the doorstep. She didn’t have her girls with her, and I can remember wondering where they were. Mum was crying too, and there was a taxi with its engine running. Dad went out and paid it, and brought a suitcase back in with him, which I thought was weird, but Mum had already taken Jo through to the kitchen, and Dad waved Shane and me back to bed.

‘I didn’t really think about it again till years later. Jo stayed the night. I suppose Dad drove her home in the morning. It didn’t seem like such a big deal at the time. Grown-ups argue. Everyone’s parents spent the odd night on a couch. Things were always stitched up in the morning.’

He went to swig his beer and realised it was empty.

‘Mum persuaded her to stay with King, I guess. I’m sure it wasn’t that hard. Where did she think she was going? How did she think she was going to manage? She had no money, no trade. No experience doing anything other than working in the shop. King took the photos and ran the machine that developed everyone else’s.

‘It’s a nice idea, isn’t it?’ he added, flicking the lid off another beer with the tail edge of a knife. ‘Just fucking off. Life’s not like that, though, is it?’

It was a Lily thing to say, and I shook my head, No, it isn’t, but I’d begun to wonder if it could be. If it might be.

‘I don’t think Mum has ever properly forgiven herself. For stopping Jo leaving that night, you know? But no one knew what King was really like, then. He was your regular “merry old soul”!’ He made quotation marks with his fingers, and gave a sour little laugh.

‘The next thing, Jo was pregnant again and they all got to see how jolly he was once the baby was born.’

‘Rosemary?’

He nodded. ‘She might have stayed with him, but she wasn’t faithful. You know that. Everyone knew it soon enough. As soon as Rosemary could sit up straight, you could see it. But Joanna never admitted it, even to Mum. And King stayed with her, I’ll give him that, so maybe he believed her, but I doubt it. I think he was just lazy, and it was easier for him to go along with the lie. In public, anyway. In private he was something else.’

There were four empty bottles in front of Eddie now.

‘The phone would ring in the night, and we’d hear Mum talking to Joanna: “Take the baby. Lock the door. Tom’s on his way”. And Dad would bolt off and Mum would wait up in her dressing-gown till he got back. It went on for years. Mum went sometimes, but it was usually Dad. No one trusted King around a woman when he’d been drinking. Dad said he was shagging anything that moved towards the end, and it wasn’t all consensual, if you know what I mean.’ Eddie sneered even as he looked disgusted, almost apologetic. ‘Her life would have been so different if she’d gone,’ he said.

‘Whose?’

He shook the question away. ‘Well, there would have been no Rosemary, would there? There’d have been none of this.’ He waved his arms at the home around him. ‘None of that.’ His eyes falling on the book I still held in my lap. What to Expect When You’re Expecting.

I worried that something too familiar might be pointing the shadow of a finger at his own wife’s disappearance, and hoped it was only his seeing Joanna again after so many years that had nudged these memories up.

He drained a fifth bottle and dragged a hand down his face.

‘You need to sleep,’ I told him.

We both knew what the next day held, what was set to be let go, and it was deep dark now; night had fallen like a curtain. I stood up to leave, gathering the bottles to take with me.

‘What I’ve never understood,’ Eddie said, as I reached for the door, ‘is why she didn’t take Rosemary with her when she finally did go. I don’t know why she left her here, when there was nothing here for her. Why do you think that was, Meg?’

He didn’t often use my name, and it kept me there with my hand flat on the flyscreen.

‘I don’t know, Eddie.’

But actually, I did. We portion blame like berries. We keep some for ourselves, we give more or less to the person who deserves it, but the little left can end up in the most unlikely places.