I set Rosemary’s postcard—the one I’d tucked back between the pages of What to Expect in Eddie’s kitchen—on the table. Brisbane on the front in yellow bubble writing, balloon-like in a too-blue sky beside the clock tower. I hadn’t needed it to know which city’s hall the building was. Officially opened in 1930, the small print on the back told me, but I knew that already, and that in front of and either side of its columned entrance lay two lions cast in bronze, though in Rosemary’s postcard they were hidden in the shadows of towering palms and a statue of King George up on his horse.

I took my own postcard from the book beside my bed. The postcard I’d kept for years. The card that had survived when so many other special precious things had not, safe in the book that I was reading, in the bag that I had with me the day I lost my home, and everything within it, in a sweep of rain and mud. The card that was old even when I found it, trapped in the library book Joanna Cole’s pasty daughter returned the week after her mother moved to Melbourne.

The City Hall lion, his paws together and his head so slightly bowed. One of a pair, its own fine print read. Modelled on the bronze lions of Trafalgar Square. Unveiled in 1938. I knew it by heart.

The messages on the backs of the cards were almost identical.

March 2, 10 am, don’t forget!

Mark your diary! 10 am, March 2 x

Even without them, even ignoring the date, there was unmistakable sameness. The soft grey-black tails of f, g and y; 1973 postmarks faded like tattoos; the same initial curled in both cards’ corners: the P that could have been an A.

The same address: 16 Rosella Street, Winifred, Qld.

To Joanna Cole.

Either card arriving on its own might not have drawn too much attention, a reminder easily explained away, even with the kiss. Still, I imagine she was sure to be the one to check the letterbox.

I took the back of an opened envelope for a scrap of paper, and I worked from Rosemary’s twenty-first, which was the only date I knew.

She was born in 1973, but not until September. In February, Eddie would have just turned nine, and Joanna Cole was already pregnant when she woke him up in the middle of the night with her hammering on the door—a train ticket in her pocket, and her bags in the back of the taxi that idled behind her in the dark. Her girls were fast asleep in their beds, with no idea she’d be gone when they woke up in the morning. Would she have made it, if she hadn’t stopped to say goodbye to her best friend? If Leonie had said, ‘Go on, then,’ would Joanna have gone?

If ifs and ands …

What had Leonie said to make Joanna stay?

Better the devil you know?

Candles snuffed and blankets folded, did she shine a harsher light into the corners of her friend’s affair? Tell her life’s not like that? Draw a finger through the dust of dreams, drag the sheets back to reveal the stains on the mattress underneath; handprints greasy on the window; fruit flies drowned in the dregs of wine sticky in the bottom of their glasses?

How long had they been apart already? Were secrets beginning to feel dirty?

Could she really leave her children? They were not boxed possessions she could send for in a week or two and were not quite old enough to follow by themselves. King would not have let them go to her. He was not a man who would have let her have them and, as Eddie said, she had no skills to trade.

‘What will you do?’ Perhaps that was all Leonie had to ask her. I wonder did she stumble on her words, as I had?

Had Joanna known yet that she was pregnant?

I leafed through the book Eddie had returned to me. Rosemary would have been the size of a grain of rice, perhaps an olive, safe in her mother’s womb, tucked beneath a blanket on the Lambs’ couch. The man who would be her husband, still a boy, asleep in a blue room at the other end of the passage.

Things were always stitched up in the morning.

‘It’ll all work out, you know,’ Leonie might have told Joanna. It’s what Joanna had promised Eddie, and what Rosemary had often told me when she saw me worrying threads and corners.

(‘Not by itself it won’t,’ Lily was fonder of saying.)

I don’t know that Rosemary would have wondered any more than I did about the card she found, wherever it was she found it. Either one by itself was nothing more than a reminder from a friend. Wherever would she have caught an idea that its curling hand belonged to her real father?

P or A.

Don’t forget!

He had not just been passing through. Rosemary was not the product of one night with a stranger. He had a name her mother knew and must have thrilled to hear on others’ lips, feel the shape of on her own. A delicious special-secret something, and there had been enough between them for Joanna to have packed her bags and grown a plan to join him.

Did she let him know she was not coming, or did she let him wait for her in the square beside the lions and King George upon his horse? How long might he have waited, checking his watch against the clock on the tall tower? Would he have settled on a bench eventually with his head in his hands? Called her from a public telephone that afternoon or the next? Would she have answered?

How many letters did he send Joanna in the weeks that followed? The squeak of the letterbox bringing her a spidery chill higher than the butterflies whose wings must have fluttered so deliciously in the beginning.

I don’t believe he knew there was a baby. If he’d loved her enough to plan their future, then he would have come back for her if he’d known they had a child.

Eddie was right: Joanna’s life would have been so very different if she’d gone. But she’d stopped to say goodbye, chosen to stay, and sealed the envelope of Rosemary’s own chance at a Life Like That.

What had she been expecting?