Dying was such an elegant way to leave a relationship. No infidelity, no boredom, no long, complicated conversations late into the night. No “She’s still single, I hear.” No running into each other at parties and weddings. No “She’s stacked on the weight” or “She’s showing her age.” Dying was final and mysterious and gave you the last word forever.

“That’s my mum.”

Ellen started. Jack was standing next to her, looking at the photo in her hand. “That’s the day I was born. My mum is dead.”

“Yes.” Ellen carefully put the photo back in its place. She wondered if Jack felt the same way about his dead mother as she did about her nonexistent father: a sort of emotion without emotion. “I know.”

“My dad’s ex-girlfriend is at the front door,” said Jack. “Saskia. She lived with us for a while.”

“Do you remember her?” asked Ellen curiously.

Jack looked shifty. “Sort of. Like, I remember her picking me up from school, and she used to say, ‘Welcome back, Jack!’ She always had this little plate ready with biscuits and fruit and stuff.” He gave her a quick, warning glance. “Dad doesn’t like to talk about her.”

“I know,” said Ellen. Why was Saskia picking him up from school? Didn’t she have to work? Why wasn’t Patrick picking him up after school?

Out the front of the house, there was the sound of a woman’s raised voice, and then a car door slammed and tires squealed.

He said he would call the police if I didn’t leave.

I hadn’t even known he was going to be there. I was so pleased with how good I looked in my red dress and I still felt so cleansed from that naked swim at the beach, and I had this idea that going to visit Patrick’s mum and dad was just a normal, social, everyday thing to do. I was half thinking that maybe it was time to start looking up some old friends, and they seemed like a good place to start.

I didn’t think of it as part of my “habit.” My dirty, nasty little habit.

The proof is that I didn’t even notice Patrick’s car was parked out front! And I’m fixated on that car. I’ve got so used to following it, my vision telescopes in on it even when I’m stuck in traffic miles behind.

All I was thinking about as I walked up the front path was about the first time Patrick brought me here to meet the family. Jack running up the path ahead of us. I was nervous because it had been less than a year since Colleen had died and I thought they might think I was too quick to snap up the grieving widower.

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.