Kara graciously accepted the bottle. “Can she get out of her cot herself now?”

“So it seems,” said Lyn, trying to readjust to a new world where Maddie could no longer be safely incarcerated in her cot.

The doorbell and the office phone began to ring simultaneously.

“Could you watch her for a minute?” asked Lyn.

“Sorry.” Kara swung herself off the bench and handed the bottle back to Maddie. “I’m really late for school.”

Carelessly, she ruffled Maddie’s dark curly head. “Seeya, sweetie!”

Maddie’s bottom lip quivered. She slammed the bottle down on the floor.

Lyn picked up Kara’s half-eaten apple from the kitchen bench and threw it in the rubbish bin. She scooped up Maddie and walked toward the front door.

“Kara, Kara,” Maddie sobbed pitifully.

“I know just what you mean, darling,” said Lyn, holding tight to her squirming little body. “Kara, Kara.”

To: Michael

From: Lyn

Subject: Please hurry home

Shocking day. Both your daughters driving me insane.

P.S. Who did you lose your virginity to?

P.P.S. Please pick up milk and cockroach baits on your way home.

To: Lyn

From: Michael

Subject: O.K.

Home at 6:30 at the latest.

Fish and chips on beach to make up for my daughters?

Lost my virginity to Jane Brewer on the way home from watching Star Wars at the movies. The force was with me! HA!

P.S. Why?

It was past midnight that same day. Michael kissed her tenderly and said, “You did come, didn’t you?”

“Yes, of course,” said Lyn. “Ages ago.”

She moved her hips. “Heavy.”

“Sorry.” He rolled onto his back with a sigh and reached across to the bedside table for a glass of water. “No need for me to pick up stray women in bars.”

“Michael!”

“Just letting you know you’re safe with me, sweetheart.”

“Well, thanks, you big chauvinist pig.”

He put down his glass of water and settled back down into bed, making contented purring sounds as he pulled up the quilt and curled his body around Lyn’s back.

He was always so chipper after sex.

“Cat is devastated,” said Lyn.

“Hmmm.”

“You’re not very sympathetic.”

“Your sweet sister can be a real bitch.”

“So can I.”

“No you can’t.

“We’re identical. Remember?”

“No. You’re my lovely little Lynnie.”

Efficiently, he bundled her hair to the side so it wouldn’t tickle his face, kissed her shoulder blade, and within seconds began to snore into the back of her neck.

Sex with husband. Check.

I absolutely did not think that, she thought.

She shouldn’t have let Michael call Cat a bitch. She wasn’t, for one thing, but more important, Cat never let anyone say a bad word about her sisters. Oh, she could say plenty of bad words about them but nobody else—not even Dan, Lyn would bet, in the privacy of their own bedroom. Cat’s loyalty was fierce and staunch.

In their school days, Cat was their own personal hit man, their hired thug. When they were seven, for example, Josh Desouza spread a vicious rumor about Gemma. The rumor was that she’d shown him her underpants. (The rumor was true. He tricked her by accusing her of not wearing any. “But I am!” cried Gemma, devastated. “Prove it,” he said.) When Cat heard about it, her face went bright red. She walked straight up to Josh in the middle of the playground and head-butted him. Head-butting hurt a lot, she confided to them afterward, but she didn’t cry, well, only a little bit, when she got home and saw the red mark on her forehead.

Now they were in their thirties, Cat was still ready to spring to their defense, often unnecessarily. Just the other day she and Lyn went out to lunch. “Didn’t you ask for a salad?” Cat said to Lyn. “Excuse me! My sister hasn’t got her salad!”

“I am actually capable of asking myself,” said Lyn.

“My sister.” Cat said it with such unconscious pride. Even after she’d just been telling you what a complete loser you were for ordering a bocconcini salad, when everyone knew bocconcini was a conspiracy to make you eat rubber.

“I’ve got something to tell you,” she said to them in the pub, as if they didn’t already know that the moment they saw her face from the other side of the room.

Lyn fell suddenly, very deeply asleep.

The voice was teeth-jarringly sweet. “Lyn! Georgina! How are you?” Lyn’s stomach muscles tightened in anticipation. She tucked the portable phone under her ear. “Hello, Georgina. How are you?”

She was in the middle of trying to undress Maddie for an unscheduled bath. Maddie had just spent five pleasurable minutes smearing herself with sticky black Vegemite and didn’t want her handiwork removed.

There was only one person capable of leaving an open Vegemite jar sitting in the middle of the living room floor: Georgina’s daughter Kara.

“To be honest, Lyn, I’m rather annoyed.”

Maddie sensed her mother’s attention slip and squirmed free. She escaped from the bathroom, chortling with wicked glee.

“What’s wrong?”

Lyn turned off the bath taps and followed Maddie out into the hallway. Her sisters told her that she had well and truly paid her penance for breaking up Georgina’s marriage by practically bringing up her daughter, leaving her free to lead a life of leisure. They also reminded her that not only had Georgina blissfully remarried some guy who looked like Brad Pitt and seemed bizarrely quite nice, but that she was a vindictive bitch from hell who deserved to have her husband stolen from under her nose.