I remember Simon was in his last year of school. He was still wearing his school uniform and for some reason he’d got hold of some elastic bands and done his hair in a whole lot of tiny little pigtails sticking up all over his head, like a hedgehog’s quills. Maureen kept apologizing for him.

That’s what I was thinking about as I walked up the driveway: how nice they’d all been to me. The front door looked exactly the same.

Stupid. For an intelligent woman, sometimes I’m so, so stupid. Did I really think that just because their front door looked the same that the last few years had never happened, that I was just a regular old friend dropping by? My capacity for self-delusion is enormous.

Then I knocked on the door and I heard a burst of laughter, as if they were all laughing at me. It made me snap back to reality, and that’s when I turned my head and saw Patrick’s car. I couldn’t believe I’d missed it, and I thought, He’s brought Ellen over. He’s introducing them to Ellen.

I thought about running away, except that they would have seen me, and, anyway, part of me wanted to march into that house to say, “How can you meet this new woman as if I never existed? How can you do it all, the interested questions, the careful pouring of not very good wine, the special Harbour Bridge tray, I bet, with the Jatz biscuits, all exactly the same, except with a different woman? Doesn’t that seem bizarre? Wrong?”

And then Jack opened the door. Of course I’ve seen him, more often than Patrick knows, but I haven’t got this close to him since the day I left. I could have approached him many times, but I never wanted to confuse him or upset him.

He smiled at me. The loveliest open smile. His beautiful eyes are still exactly the same. And then he started chatting with me, perfectly naturally, telling me about how I’d knocked at the same time as he’d said “knock knock” to tell a knock knock joke, and what were the chances of that happening, like one chance in a thousand, in a million? And I was laughing when Maureen appeared and she had a polite, perplexed expression on her face, and it vanished as soon as she saw me. She looked horrified, as if I was a home invader.

And then Patrick appeared, his face so ugly with anger, and then his dad, all serious and frowning, as if there had been a car accident, and Simon, all grown up, no pigtails, not even looking at me, just grabbing for Jack’s hand as if he needed to rescue him from me.

Nothing I said could make any difference. They just wanted me to go.

I wanted to scream: But I loved you all! You were my family!

“We loved her,” said Maureen to Ellen. “We really did.”

“Can we please change the subject to something more interesting?” said Patrick, but everyone ignored him.

They had finished dinner and Jack had fallen asleep on the couch in the living room, and Ellen thought that everyone had maybe drunk a little more than they normally would have following the stress of the Saskia incident, and their tongues were loosening up nicely.

“Of course, we were upset when Patrick broke up with her. I felt absolutely terrible for her,” continued Maureen. “She didn’t have any family here, you see, she grew up in Tasmania, so we were like her family.”

“I’m sure Ellen doesn’t want to hear all this,” said Patrick.

“I don’t mind,” said Ellen, which was the understatement of the century.

“People fall out of love,” said George. “You can’t blame him for how he felt.”

“I know that, George,” said Maureen irritably. “It doesn’t stop me from feeling for the poor girl.”

“She needs to let Patrick be now,” said George. “This has gone on long enough.”

“She was like a mother to Jack.” Maureen ignored her husband and talked directly to Ellen.

“You should have let her keep seeing Jack,” said Simon to Patrick.

“How many times do I have to say this? She never asked to see him,” said Patrick. “As soon as I said I wanted to end it, she just went crazy, completely, certifiably crazy.”

“Her heart was broken,” said Maureen.

“Whatever, I didn’t think Jack was safe around her.”

“Also, her mother had just died,” said Maureen.

“Yeah, your timing sort of sucked,” said Simon.

“She was very close to her mother,” said Maureen to Ellen. “They spoke on the telephone every single day. My boys would go crazy if I tried to speak to them every day! Although, of course, I’m sure it’s different with daughters.” She looked wistful for a moment. “Do you speak to your mother every day, Ellen?”

“No.” Ellen smiled, although they did actually e-mail or text or have some form of communication nearly every day.

“Saskia’s father died when she was very young, you see, and she had no sisters or brothers, so her mother was all the family she had,” said Maureen. “She took her mother’s death very hard.”

“It was a month after her mother had died,” said Patrick. “Her mother had been sick for a whole year. How much longer was I meant to wait? I didn’t think it was fair to her to keep pretending.”

“A month is nothing,” said Simon.

Ellen privately agreed.

“Listen to Mr. Sensitive here. You broke up with your last girlfriend by text message!” said Patrick.

“It was a very caring text message. Anyway, I wasn’t living with her.”

“When Patrick first went into business for himself, he was very busy, obviously, and Saskia started working part-time so she could look after Jack.” Maureen was directing all of her conversation at Ellen. “She really was a wonderful mother to him.”

“Colleen was his mother,” said Patrick.

“Well, of course she was, darling, but Colleen wasn’t there.”

“Which wasn’t her fault.”

“Of course it wasn’t, I’m just trying to be fair to Saskia, and to say that she did a wonderful job.”

“Colleen would have done it better. And Colleen wasn’t crazy.”

“You never dumped Colleen,” said Simon. “So you don’t know.”

“I do know,” said Patrick. “I do know. And anyway, I would never have dumped Colleen.” There was a perceptible tremor of emotion in his voice that caused a hush around the table. Ellen saw that everyone was trying not to look at her. She felt Maureen’s excellent roast lamb and baked potatoes sitting lumpily in her stomach. Well, naturally he’s still in love with his dead wife. The damned girl had to go and die before she had time to get boring or annoying.