Over the years Cecilia had often prodded him for more information about this time in his life. ‘But why did it seem so hard? What exactly was so hard?’ But John-Paul didn’t seem capable of clarifying further. ‘I guess I was just your typical anguished teenager,’ he’d say. Cecilia didn’t get it. She was never anguished as a teenager. Eventually she had to give up and accept John-Paul’s suicide attempt as an out-of-character incident in his past. ‘I just needed a good woman,’ John-Paul told her. It was true there had never been a serious girlfriend until Cecilia came along. ‘I was honestly starting to think he might be g*y,’ one of his brothers had confided in her once.

There was the g*y thing again.

But his brother had been joking.

An unexplained suicide attempt in his teenage years, and now, all these years later, he was crying in the shower.

‘Sometimes grown-ups have big things on their mind,’ said Cecilia carefully to Esther. Obviously her first responsibility was to make sure that Esther wasn’t concerned. ‘So I’m sure Daddy was just –’

‘Hey, Mum, can I please get this book on Amazon about the Berlin Wall for Christmas?’ asked Esther. ‘Do you want me to order it now? All the reviews are five stars!’

‘No,’ said Cecilia. ‘You can borrow it from the library.’

God willing, they’d have escaped from Berlin by Christmas.

She turned into the parking lot underneath the speech therapist’s office, wound down the window and pressed the button on the intercom.

‘Can I help you?’

‘We’re here to see Caroline Otto,’ she said. Even when she talked to the receptionist she rounded her vowels.

As she parked the car, she considered each new fact.

John-Paul giving Isabel strange, ‘sad, angry’ looks.

John-Paul crying in the shower.

John-Paul losing interest in sex.

John-Paul lying about something.

It was all so strange and worrying, but there was something beneath it all that was not actually unpleasant, that was in fact giving her a mild sense of anticipation.

She turned off the ignition, pulled on the handbrake and undid her seatbelt.

‘Let’s go,’ she said to Esther, and opened the car door. She knew what was giving her that little blip of pleasure. It was because she’d made a decision. Something was clearly not right. She had a moral obligation to do something immoral. It was the lesser of two evils. She was justified.

As soon as the girls were in bed tonight, she would do what she’d wanted to do from the very beginning. She was going to open that goddamned letter.

Chapter nine

There was a knock at the door.

‘Ignore it.’ Tess’s mother didn’t look up from her book.

Tess, Liam and her mother were sitting in separate armchairs in her mother’s front room, reading their books with small bowls full of chocolate raisins resting on their laps. It had been one of Tess’s daily routines as a child: eating chocolate raisins and reading with her mother. They always did star jumps afterward to counteract the chocolate.

‘It might be Dad.’ Liam put his book down. Tess was surprised at how readily he’d agreed to sit and read. It must have been the chocolate raisins. She could never get him to do his reading for school.

And now, bizarrely, he was starting at a new school. Just like that. Tomorrow. It was disconcerting the way that peculiar woman had convinced him to start the very next day, with the promise of an Easter egg hunt.

‘You spoke to your dad in Melbourne just a few hours ago,’ she reminded Liam, keeping her voice neutral. He and Will had talked for twenty minutes. ‘I’ll talk to Daddy later,’ Tess had said when Liam had held out the phone. She’d already spoken to Will once that morning. Nothing had changed. She didn’t want to hear his awful serious new voice again. And what could she say? Mention that she’d run into an ex-boyfriend at St Angela’s? Ask if he was jealous?

Connor Whitby. It must have been over fifteen years since she’d seen him. They’d gone out for less than a year. She hadn’t even recognised him when he’d walked into the office. He’d lost all his hair and seemed a much bigger, broader version of the man she remembered. The whole thing had been so awkward. Bad enough that she was sitting across the desk from a woman whose daughter had been murdered.

‘Maybe Daddy got on a plane to surprise us,’ said Liam.

There was a rap on the window right near Tess’s head. ‘I know you’re all in there!’ said a voice.

‘For God’s sake.’ Tess’s mother closed her book with a snap.

Tess turned and saw her aunt’s face pressed flat against the window, her hands cupped around her eyes so she could peer inside.

‘Mary, I told you not to come over!’ Lucy’s voice rocketed up several octaves. She always sounded forty years younger when she spoke to her twin sister.

‘Open the door!’ Auntie Mary rapped again on the glass. ‘I need to talk to Tess!’

‘Tess doesn’t want to talk to you!’ Lucy lifted her crutch and jabbed it in the air in Mary’s direction.

‘Mum,’ said Tess.

‘She’s my niece! I have rights!’ Auntie Mary tried to wrench the wooden window frame up.

‘She has rights,’ snorted Tess’s mother. ‘What a load of –’

‘But why can’t she come in?’ Liam’s brow knitted.

Tess and her mother looked at each other. They’d been so careful about what they said in front of Liam.

‘Of course she can come in.’ Tess put her book to one side. ‘Grandma was just teasing.’

‘Yes, Liam, just a silly game!’ cooed Lucy.

‘Lucy, let me in! I genuinely feel faint!’ shouted Auntie Mary. ‘I’m going to faint on your precious gardenias!’

‘Such a funny game!’ Lucy chuckled insanely. It reminded Tess of the ineffectual job she used to do of perpetuating the Santa Claus myth. She was the worst liar on the planet.

‘Go let them in,’ Tess said to Liam. She turned to Auntie Mary at the window and pointed towards the front door. ‘We’re coming.’

Auntie Mary crashed off through the garden. ‘Oops-a-

daisy.’

‘I’ll give you oops-a-bloody-daisy,’ muttered Lucy.

Tess felt a sharp sense of loss at the thought that she wouldn’t be able to share this story about their mothers with Felicity. It was like the real Felicity had vanished along with her old fat body. Did she exist anymore? Had she ever existed?