“I don’t know,” said Madeline. She wondered wistfully if her coffee was sitting on the table up at Blue Blues getting cold.

“Next thing she’s pregnant, and supposedly Zach isn’t the father, although we did always wonder about that, but she was absolutely adamant that Zach was not the father. She said it over and over again. A one-night stand, she said. No way of contacting the father. Well, you know, she was halfway through her arts-law degree, it wasn’t ideal, but everything happens for a reason, don’t you think?”

“Absolutely,” said Madeline, who did not believe that at all.

“She’d been told by a doctor that she was likely to have a lot of trouble falling pregnant naturally, so it just seemed like it was meant to be. And then my darling dad died while Jane was pregnant and that’s why it seemed like his soul might have come back in—”

“Mu-um! Madeline!”

Jane’s mother startled, and they both turned away from the sea to see Jane standing on the boardwalk outside Blue Blues, waving frantically. “Your coffee is ready!”

“Coming!” called Madeline.

“I’m sorry,” said Di as they walked back up from the beach. “I talk too much. Can you please forget everything I said? It’s just that when I saw poor little Ziggy didn’t get asked to that child’s birthday party, I felt like crying. I’m so emotional these days, and then we had to get up so early today, I’m feeling quite light-headed. I didn’t used to be, I used to be quite hard-hearted. It’s my age, I’m fifty-eight. My friends are the same, we went out for lunch the other day, we’ve been friends since our children started kindergarten! We were all talking about how we feel like fifteen-year-olds, weeping at the drop of a hat.”

Madeline stopped walking. “Di,” she said.

Di turned to her nervously, as if she were about to be told off. “Yes?”

“I’ll keep an eye on Jane,” she said. “I promise.”

Gabrielle: See, part of the problem was that Madeline sort of adopted Jane. She was like a crazy, protective big sister. If you ever said anything even mildly critical of her Jane, you’d have Madeline snarling at you like a rabid dog.

20.

It was eleven a.m. on the first day of Ziggy’s school life.

Had he already had his morning tea by now? Was he eating his apple and his cheese and crackers? His tiny box of raisins? Jane’s heart twisted at the thought of him carefully opening his new lunch box. Where would he sit? Who would he talk to? She hoped Chloe and the twins were playing with him, but they could just as easily be ignoring him. It wasn’t like one of the twins would stroll up to Ziggy, hand outstretched, and say, “Why, hello! Ziggy, isn’t it? We met a few weeks back at a playdate. How have you been?”

She stood up from the dining room table where she was working and stretched her arms high above her head. He’d be fine. Every child went to school. They survived. They learned the rules of life.

She went into the tiny kitchen of her new apartment to switch the kettle on for a cup of tea she didn’t especially feel like. It was just an excuse to take a break from the accounts of Perfect Pete’s Plumbing. Pete might be a perfect plumber, but he wasn’t that great at keeping his paperwork in order. Every quarter she received a shoe box filled with an odd assortment of scrunched, smudged, strange-smelling paperwork: invoices, credit card bills and receipts, most of which were not claimable. She could just imagine Pete emptying out his pockets, scooping up all the receipts from the console of his car in one meaty hand, stomping around his house, grabbing every piece of paper he could find before stuffing the lot into the shoe box with a gusty sigh of relief. Job done.

She went back to the dining room table and picked up the next receipt. Perfect Pete’s wife had just spent $335 at the beautician, where she had enjoyed the “classic facial,” “deluxe pedicure” and a bikini-line wax. So that was nice for Perfect Pete’s wife. Next was an unsigned permission note for a school excursion to Taronga Zoo last year. On the back of the permission note, a child had written in purple crayon: “I HATE TOM!!!!!”

Jane studied the permission note.

I will/will not be able to attend the excursion as a parent helper.

Perfect Pete’s wife had already circled “will not.” Too busy getting her bikini line done.

She crumpled the receipt and permission slip in her hand and walked back into the kitchen.

She could be a parent helper if Ziggy ever went on an excursion. After all, that was why she’d originally decided to become a bookkeeper so she could be “flexible” for Ziggy, and “balance motherhood and career,” even though she always felt foolish and fraudulent when she said things like that, as if she weren’t really a mother, as if her whole life were a fake.

It would be fun to go on a school excursion again. She could still remember the excitement. The treats on the bus. Jane could secretly observe Ziggy interact with the other children. Make sure he was normal.

Of course he was normal.

She thought again, as she had been all morning, of the pale pink envelopes. So many of them! It didn’t matter that he wasn’t invited to the party. He was too little to feel hurt, and none of the children knew one another yet anyway. It was silly to even think about it.

But the truth was, she felt deeply hurt on his behalf, and somehow responsible, as if she’d messed up. She’d been so ready to forget all about the incident on orientation day, and now it was back at the forefront of her mind again.