SOON I was home in my townhouse — with an enormous ladybird-shaped belly — sorting out, cleaning up. ‘Nesting’, I thought they called it. Pregnancy felt somewhat like The Heaviness — the expanding, inflating, filling of my body — but imbued with joy and expectation instead of dread. What will she look like? I was teetering between the names Esther and Jordan. Esther could be shortened to Essie, Jordan to Jordy. Interesting how I pictured the diminutive suffix ‘ie’ for the former, and ‘y’ for the latter. Also interesting, and hard to believe, how you could fall so deeply in love with somebody you had not seen or held.

I packed Nan’s white, yellow, blue, and red canisters in a box with assorted kitchen items for the op shop.

Was that Christos calling from the nursery (which we’d turned into his sick room)? The pulmonary sporotrichosis — attributed to inhalation of toxic plant matter at the Greenworld garden-centre fire — had disseminated as fast as wildfire through his joints and central nervous system. The plan was to move him up to the attic when the baby came. Save a lot of work if he wasn’t still here then. Stop it, Sid. I reminded myself that he was the father of my baby, and of all the times he’d cared for me. But I was just being realistic.

In a month or so, I’d be listening for the baby crying. Jordy. I listened harder. Quiet.

Through the window, I saw Sophia crossing the street, one hand waving, the other holding a string bag of tomatoes from her garden. She limped through the front gate. I closed the box, and met her at the door. It took a moment to realise what was different about her today: she’d swapped her black clothes for a floral dress.

‘You look nice,’ I said. We kissed cheeks.

‘How is Christo?’

‘Sleeping. Let’s have a coffee.’

Sophia followed me into the kitchen. She scowled at the holes in the wall. ‘Where is that shelf?’

‘Aubrey helped me take it down yesterday.’

‘Good. It was ugh.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Not too early for a shandy?’ She opened the fridge door.

‘Out of lemonade,’ I said.

She shrugged, and pulled the top off a can of beer. ‘Share with me?’

I shook my head and patted my belly.

Halfway up the stairs, a sharp pain shot down my left leg — the baby pressing on a nerve. I grasped the bannister and took deep breaths while I waited for the pain to subside. The spoon fell out of the bowl of mashed vegetables Sophia had prepared for Christos. I was too big to lean forward; I had to bend at the knees and reach sideways to pick up the spoon from the carpet. I stuck it back in the bowl and, groaning, continued my laborious ascent to the nursery.

‘You OK, Sid?’ Sophia poked her head around from the kitchen, where she was now making a salad.

‘All good.’

The hospice-in-the-home nurses had taught me how to use the oxygen equipment to keep Christos’s lungs working. He winced as I removed the tubing from his nose so I could feed him. I squeezed my whale’s body into the chair beside the bed.

‘Do you know why I stayed with you all these years?’ Christos had asked that question a lot in the last couple of months. ‘Because you were my angel, Sid. My princess.’

I loaded the spoon and aimed it at his mouth.

‘But you were so easily led,’ he went on with his mouth full, ‘so silly around boys, men. I had to look after you. Protect you.’

I gritted my teeth. The baby kicked.

‘Protect you from your own behaviour.’

I stuffed more mash — a little too much — into his mouth. He gagged and coughed. It would have been so easy to choke him.

When he’d finished coughing, I wiped the dribble from his stubbly chin with the edge of the spoon. I remembered from childhood that cold, wet, scraping feeling; I would never do that to my baby.

‘And protect you from going to jail for what happened to Cola.’

I froze with another spoonful of mash in midair. I had a flash of him saying something similar, but I couldn’t grasp where or when. A winter night. A country road. Headlights in the rear-view mirror.

He said something in Greek.

‘What did you say?’

He repeated the Greek words.

‘No, before that. About Dean Cola.’

He shrugged.

I tried to keep my voice low so Sophia wouldn’t hear. ‘What did you say?’

‘Cola should have gone to jail for what happened to you at that party.’

I shook my head. ‘I know that Dean didn’t hurt me.’

‘You shouldn’t have —’

‘And I don’t think I started the fire at Broken River Road.’ Grass, earth, screaming, broken glass. ‘How could I have just stood there and let my hands burn?’

He glanced warily up at the spider’s web, which he’d asked me to sweep away but was still hanging grey in the corner. ‘You were insane.’

Skyline and stars. Blood and flames.

‘You’ll never understand what I did for you.’

‘You mean what you did to me?’ I sniffed back tears — angry, not sad tears — and sat up straighter. ‘I should’ve tried harder to leave you. Never should have married you in the first place.’

He said something else in Greek and smacked my hand away. He had no strength, but he caught me off guard; a glob of mash hit the custard-yellow wall. ‘Get your fucking repulsive hands away from me. God’s punishment for being a slut and cheating on me with Cola that night.’

The hospice nurses had prepared me for Christos’s disease hallucinations and delusions. In them, he was usually fighting some long-ago fire, or spiders. The nurses had told me to avoid engaging when he was delusional — at those times, he’d look straight through me, like I wasn’t there — but he was lucid now, useless tears glossing his dull eyes like rain on asphalt.

‘I know what you did,’ I hoisted myself up out of the chair, ‘and I know that what I know is true.’

‘No, you don’t.’

‘I recorded everything.’

He laughed and wheezed, but something far from amusement and disbelief flickered in his wet eyes. ‘No. Don’t go. Please. Sit. Stay with me.’

I walked away.