Dana’s studied the language of her new job. It’s on the company website: names of stakeholders, policies and legislation, all hidden in gobbets of capital letters. She won’t look blank when somebody requests the BOC figures; there won’t be a microsecond pause when somebody mentions the LFN team.

It’s the other language she’s forgotten how to speak. Does her sprigged blouse say “professional”? Does her old Wild Poppies lipstick still mean “powerful”? Or is it merely “try-hard”? They worked for her last job. But a lot has changed in two years.

And shoes! Surely heels are always in fashion? Necessary, for an office in the CBD. But nowadays, tripping along the cracked streets, heels might say something else. You are the weakest link. You have not adjusted to the new reality.

Dana leans into the mirror. No doubt there will be an imperfection if she stares hard enough. A crack, not in the mirror, but in her.

The phone rings, and she glances over. Her ex, Greg. Ignore that. This is her first day in a job she needs, and she’ll go into it with a clear head.

Too late. Memory rises up like a wave curling to break inside her chest, and she has to close her eyes for a moment to force it back down.

Two years ago, Dana was standing right here, getting ready for her then-job, and it wasn’t Greg on the phone but her best friend Melanie. Back then, Melanie needed the same transforming spell Dana’s looking for now: the one to conjure Woman Who Works in Office.

“I’ve tried six outfits! What’s office wear like these days?” she’d wailed to Dana.

Greg had breathed Dana’s ear, “Tell her tracksuits.” Dana bugged her eyes out at him warningly while asking Melanie, “Did you get a look at anyone else when you went for the interview? How much makeup do they wear?”

While Melanie dithered back and forth, Greg came over and folded Dana’s fingers around a coffee mug. “She’ll wear out her mirror,” he murmured. Dana butted her head against his arm.

“Wear the green jacket I lent you,” she told Melanie.

“Can I? I reckon it got me the job. Pulled the whole look together.”

“Good! Hang on to it as long as you need.”

“What if they notice it’s the same one I wore to the interview?

“Nah. Lucky jacket, you gotta wear it.”

“Or you can show up in trainers,” said Greg, leaning his chin on Dana’s head. “What’ll they do, fire you?”

Nervous laughter from Melanie.

“Don’t listen to the layabout,” said Dana. “Good luck! You’ll crush this.”

Melanie had returned the green jacket that evening. They’d sat round the fireplace toasting Melanie’s triumphant first day at her new job. “I wore the heels,” said Melanie, stretching her legs to the fire before taking off her Jimmy Choos to massage her feet.

“Killer,” said Greg. But his admiring look was for Dana. Later in bed he’d show her what he thought of his wife who engineered success all round.

“Yep.” Melanie held up her shoes and clapped the heels together. “These bad boys are going to walk me to the top.”

Dana and Melanie shared a look. Women Getting Ahead. Then, “I’d better get home,” said Melanie. “Mum’s minding Katy. She’ll want to hear how my first day went.”

Katy. Since their schooldays, Dana and Melanie had measured out their lives together by coffee spoons and shot glasses. Melanie said coffee was still her best friend after Dana. But after Katy arrived, Melanie’s life ran on a different clock. She measured out her life by sippy cups.

“You wouldn’t want to miss the evening poonami,” said Greg.

Melanie gave a caw of laughter. “Just Mum’s luck! But that was months ago, Greg. Katy’s toilet trained now.”

“S’true,” said Dana. “Katy gives me all the deets. ‘Dana, I just did the most BIG—”

“Dear god, I can hardly wait,” said Greg later, after they’d watched Melanie clip-clop away out the front gate. “You haven’t said anything to her yet?”

“They say wait ’til week 12.”

“Yeah, but you two are thick as thieves. I’m amazed she hasn’t guessed.”

“Ah, no, see, she wants to be able enjoy the suspense until I say something, and then she can say ‘I knew it!’”

Greg laughed. His hand strayed around her waist and further, spreading over her belly. There was nothing to feel yet.

“Whatcha looking for, belly button fluff?” Dana pulled him into a kiss, making the most of it. This careless pleasure would be gone soon enough. Or not soon enough; Dana longed to test herself against what Melanie had endured already, of days endlessly chopped into nappy-sized squares, days of testing her resilience against sleeplessness, days of a child’s fresh flower wonder at light, dawn, birds, the shine on the world. She’d know in her own aching triumphant body the things Melanie could only describe in snatches.

That was the last of the good times.

Today it’s herself she has to bring into line with Office Perfect. Melanie doesn’t answer calls these days, so Dana can’t consult with her about her own first-day outfit.

No Greg to derail her with dumb comments either.

She hesitates, puts on the green jacket. The lucky first-day jacket.

There’s no such thing as fate.

She’s stood in front of her mirror for so long the morning sun has moved onto the bevelled edge and into her eye. With a snort—you have to choose something!—she stoops to find her mid-heels and jams them on her feet, then stuffs her trainers in her bag. Just in case.

Dana takes the phone off the charger—battery: 100 percent—and drops it in her bag. It’s a ridiculous object, this bag; a hulking op-shop sack of boulders. With the water bottle, it adds up to aching shoulders and a Quasimodo walk.

You used to be so well put together.

The house gives a warning rattle as Dana leaves, and she pauses for a moment in the doorway, holding the jamb. Just a truck passing, she tells herself. But a woman walking her dog past the gate pauses too, scanning around.

A large, distant roar makes Dana jump again. Some big machinery, over by the playcentre. Maybe they’re demolishing it at last.

Dana’s new supervisor Megan is wearing a jacket similar to Dana’s, so maybe Dana hasn’t missed the mark completely after two years out of the workforce.

“Welcome, welcome, here’s your desk. There’s a meeting at ten and I’ll introduce you to the rest of the staff.”

Melanie plonks her bag down next to the computer. Unbalanced, it slumps off. What now? Pretend a ten-kilo sack of rocks didn’t just almost land on her supervisor’s feet? She can feel her lipstick beginning to crack with apology. “Sorry, I’m such a klutz…”

“It’s fine, keep it by your desk. Now, let’s get you logged in…”

Dana kicks the bag further out of sight under her desk. Great first impression, idiot.

But later when she goes to retrieve it, she has a view under everyone else’s desks. Between the forest of chair-legs and fashionable feet are other lumpen bags like her own. She suspects they too are full of sensible shoes and water bottles and phone chargers.

The meeting room is a charmless low-ceilinged space with fluorescent lights and a conference table with chipped veneer. The only windows look onto a dance studio whose coordinated thumping have kept Dana on edge all morning.

A dozen people shuffle their chairs up to the table, some of them holding coffees. Maybe it’s the kind of workplace where people say things like, “I’m going to Java Bean, can I get you anything?” The lady on Dana’s right is fossicking around in her bag. She pulls out a package. Home baking, warm and gingery in its crinkly silver foil.

“Ginger crunch?” she asks brightly, offering Dana a piece.

This place might be all right.

Megan, the supervisor, stands up and introduces Dana. Dana smiles and tries to stop her mind going gerbil-wild long enough to retain at least some names. Silver-haired Mark. Violet-nail polish Gemma. High-Forehead Maxine. Mike the Eyebrow. Beardy Guy, she misses his name because he’s handing her some forms. Somebody in HR? Everything’s moving a little too fast and a bit glarey-bright, what with the lighting and all.

THUMP!

The room jumps. Dana’s gasp cuts the sudden silence.

“Oh! That’s just—” says Maxine.

The room jumps again, jolting the table under Dana’s white knuckles. Will everyone fit under it? She can swing under it in one practiced movement. But nobody else has moved, apart from their eyes, which go flick-flick-flick face to face. Dana freezes in place.

THUMP! The windows vibrate, like Dana’s nerves.

“They’re doing work next door,” says Beardy.

THUMP! Still, nobody moves.

“They’ve got this enormous pile-driver. Freaks me out every time,” says someone kindly. There’s a bit of nervous laughter. “I remember when…” somebody begins, then tries to look like they haven’t. Nobody wants that story.

Dana clutches her bag closer. The other women in the room all have their handbags with them too.

She needs this job. 

THUMP.

God. How do they stand it? How will she stand it? The way her shoulders turn to stone, the way fear squirts straight to her gut, turning it to water.

THUMP.

She might actually shit herself, right in the middle of this meeting, right into her Versace lace briefs.

~*~

 

The pile-driver finishes work by lunchtime and for the rest of the day, Dana bulls her way through the queasiness of left-over terror by concentrating on her work. There’s workflows to organise, spreadsheets to fill…

She can do this.

Megan lingers by Dana’s desk on her way out. “How’d you go? The filing system’s a bit, uh, interesting, isn’t it?”

“I’ll find my way round it. I thought I lost the whole of the Archer files for a few moments there, but…”

“…at the end of the day, nobody died,” Megan laughs.

You’re not from around here, thinks Dana.

Dana’s shortest way home is blocked by road-cones and flashing lights. Bealey Ave is leaking sludge, which is nothing new, but they must be sweeping it up, or perhaps even fixing the problem. She can hear the crump of diggers biting into the cracked tarmac. Endless roadworks, the song of the city.

So today she has to go home the other way. She keeps her head down against the slapping spring wind, the sidewalks like shatter mirror planes reflecting lively trees, joggers, the soft rush of traffic. Rain, roses, blotter-ink clouds coming and going against the sun, the houses set back from the road behind summer-thick hedges. Some hopeful souls always keep their gardens up no matter what.

Around the corner from her house, she passes the playcentre. The demolition has begun, as she’d guessed this morning. Big bulldozers pile rubble into a heap. Diggers mouth it up in mechanical jaws and dump it in a truck. Dana keeps walking, counting cracks in the pavement. The noise of demolition has been the same all over the city. One learns to block it out. Even here, thank god, finally here. She won’t have to look at it again.

The playcentre had been such a cute building. Mellow old bricks trellised with roses; a garden out back for the children to play in.

Dana remembers Melanie on the phone, two years ago. “I got Katy into that playcentre near your place. The one I really liked when I checked it out.”

“That little brick villa? It’s cute isn’t it? And I agree, the kids sound happy whenever I walk past. Hey, if there’s ever a time when you can’t pick Katy up, I’m just round the corner.”

“I might need you to, if I get that job…”

And then of course Melanie had got the job, all one sweep of her upward trajectory, god at last, I’m really doing it. And Dana did sometimes pick up Katy, and they’d walk hand in paint-stained hand, greeting their favourite fence-top cats all the way home.

And when it happened, there was nobody else to pick Katy up.

On that day, Dana had been heading towards the bookstores during her lunch break. City streets, a warm day, and she was eyeing a runner with those fluoro Nikes she fancied. He was the type that jogged on the spot waiting for the lights to change. Got to maintain the heart rate! Clearly serious about his running, so if she caught him up she’d ask him how he rated his Nikes. But he turned right into the main shopping street, meaning he must be the kind of wanker that parted the lunchtime shopping crowds on the bow-wave of his ego. 

She left him to it and took her usual route past a pocket park with its surprise murals that grew day by day. A nice respite, the full-leafed trees sponging up the acrid smell of summer traffic. The bookstores, when she reached them, had new displays.

“The No-dig Garden.” An attractive title; Dana’s garden was its usual late-summer scramble of good intentions overwhelmed by weeds. Daydreaming of tidy brick potagers, she started back to her workplace, clipping along a little too fast for the spike heels she’d chosen that day. Damn, would she ever remember how her feet swelled in the heat?

And hello, here came Fluoro-feet. A block away, but no mistaking those shoes running towards her.

Then a huge formless noise came out of nowhere and everywhere, swallowing Dana’s senses so she could barely register the ground rumpling under her.

The pavement punched her feet, slammed her hip, cracked her elbows as she fell onto concrete that rippled like a shaken rug. Such a volume of noise that people’s screaming mouths seemed silent. Shock muffled her ears.

The facades of the shops puffed out loose mortar and the brick fronts slumped out into a cloud of falling dust. What she remembered was the runner’s eyes bulging in terror, his legs pistoning as he accelerated towards her under the toppling awnings. He vanished in the dust cloud. Dana screamed. She’d just seen a man die! But no, he reappeared, blind-eyed and plaster-white, still running, the whole side of the building having missed him in its slow roar. He never saw her.

Dana was on all fours on the road with no memory of getting there. She scrambled away over tarmac that humped in long shudders. Car alarms whooped, a scream of electronic outrage. Each aftershock started a hellish percussion of bricks and breaking glass. The nearest bus came to a lop-wheeled halt on pavements suddenly awash with silt, leaving a diesel silence when the driver switched it off.

Dana’s phone rang. The whole street was alive with chirpy cheerful ringtones. There must have been other people, hundreds of them, but Dana’s memory never recorded them. There was just her phone screen, and Melanie’s name on it.

The cellphone network went down immediately, so that’s all she had. Melanie, Melanie, where are you? Dana’s mind raced; its jammed clockwork jolted into action by the name on her screen. Melanie was at her new job. In town. Alive.

“I’m OK,” Dana texted. No service, said the cellphone. Nothing to be done.

Could she help somebody? There were people, running, milling about, calling at the rubble. Piles of masonry, and people screaming, not like in the movies. Thin weak cries, and other people shouting, “In here! Quick! You grab that end!”

Dana started towards the nearest group. Her heel caught in a crack before she got there. The street ate her shoes, just like that, and it was just her Lancôme stockings versus concrete and nails and broken glass.

Dana’s phone rang. Melanie again. “Katy! I can’t get to her—”

Her job was way the hell over the other side of town.

“I’ll get Katy,” texted Dana. Nothing came back, though she stabbed at the phone hoping for a miracle from that block of dead glass. Somewhere Melanie would be holding her phone too, the little slab of hope growing sweaty in her hand, calling dead air.

Traffic was at a virtual standstill, cars stalled among cracked slabs of broken tarmac. Katy’s playcentre was walking distance from Dana’s end of the CBD. She could run, and she did.

Running on broken concrete, running on twisted sheet iron, running on rubble and dust and nails and over cracks and through the vile liquefaction pouring from those cracks, like the city was shitting itself.

Sometimes you have to run through the pain. Words from some classic runners’ Bible. Never meaning to run through razor blades, run with feet leaving bloody prints, run with a throat gaping into dust like the exposed pipes she saw everywhere.

Everywhere people were walking, dead phones clutched to their ears, or cycling, swerving over roads that shuddered with aftershocks.

“Got any water?” people asked Dana.

There was an ominous smell of smoke. The skyline had changed, and dark smudges rose from the city centre. Dana kept jogging away.

As the smell of burning crept into the air from the CBD, Dana begged strangers for water too.

Nobody had water. Dana kept going, into the tree-lined suburban streets.

~*~

 

The sheltering walls, the kind graceful spaces that keep our bodies safe from the elements are not kind when they break. Dana saw the flash of colour on Katy’s wrist, the friendship bracelet they’d made together. Katy’s hand reached for air through bricks strewn with rose petals shaken loose by the catastrophe. Dana fell to her knees for the second time that day.

There must have been other people there, many people retrieving lost children or circling helplessly crying like seabirds, or some other noise the human throat can make, and surely there were other hands besides Dana’s pulling at bricks because somehow the weight of them was moved and it wasn’t any guardian angels doing it.

“…for death is but a sleep.” The words of the service had always seemed comforting before.

Death was not a sleep. Katy’s eyes were open and the dusting of plaster on them was obscene.

The city howled with sirens. All phones were dead.

 

~*~

 

Dana passes the remains of the playcentre, head averted. Soon it will all be gone, they’ll uproot even the foundations and seed it with grass, and it will be another sad empty patch of ground, another gap in a city with more missing teeth than a meth addict.

Her house is just around the corner. The emptiness of the rooms rings in her ears. She drops her bag. She can sit. She can celebrate her first day of work. She can eat.

Or she can just sit.

Occasionally the house settles around her. Just a little reminder of the unquiet earth. It’s rare to have a day without at least one aftershock. Dana no longer enjoys the view down certain straight avenues where, in the leafless days of winter, one can see the mountains in their bright savage upthrust. The result of a million years of cataclysms like the one Dana lived through, and Katy did not.

Eventually Dana creaks over to her desk to check her emails. Her body’s aged a hundred years in the minute it took to walk past the playcentre.

Greg’s still trying to get hold of her. She’s not going to open those. He’s gone crazy. Not crazy to go to Australia—good for him, the bastard. Let him help people over there. Much good may it do him.

Crazy to ask her to come to a whole continent of new threats.

There are still corners of the city that smell of the liquefaction that dominated those awful days. Dana wants to puke every time she smells it. It takes her straight back to the day Greg had come home tired and alight with the day’s triumphs—pensioners’ driveways excavated, walls braced, owners and pets reunited, windows safely taped—that he didn’t see at once that she was crying, that she couldn’t speak. All she could do was hold up a bloody towel. Then at last he fell silent. Dana curled into his arms, her chest heaving as she sobbed in saw-edged blocks of air Greg’s skin stank of liquefaction.

What had become of her dreamy husband, those terrible days when aftershocks flicked the skin of the city like a fly-stung horse? Poet and wit, giver of foot massages and epicurean treats, he’d turned into a tanned sweaty stranger with rolled-up sleeves and new muscles, captaining shovels and wheelbarrows. For weeks, he came home reeking of the mud splashed up to his thighs. Single-handedly trying to heal a broken city.

“Not single-handed,” he’d said. “There’s an army of us. It’s something we can do. Working together.”

“Somebody needs to stay home to deal with EQC.” Though in fact Dana spent very little time dealing with the hated disaster recovery commission. The EQC had broken stronger people than her. But “waiting for a call from EQC,” meant she could remain safely curled up on the good ship Sofa, a solid mahogany piece that had ridden out all the aftershocks so far.

“You’d feel better if you came out and helped. Or at least, better than this.” He gestured at Dana’s dishevelled blanket burrow.

But that would mean forgiving him. When the meaning of those spots and more-than-spots of blood sunk in, she’d been alone. “Help other people if it makes you feel better.”

Dana can’t remember all the aftershocks or all the arguments, but she remembers that one because as they shouted at each other, the framed plaster cast that was all she had left of her pregnancy fell off the boarded-up mantelpiece. A tiny handprint, a tiny footprint, now just plaster fragments on the floor.

Shaking hands and glue everywhere, nothing to show in the end but a mess that even neat-fingered Greg couldn’t fix. He turned away, shouting, “Let’s just leave. Otherwise we’ll never be able to forget!”

“I won’t forget no matter where we go!”

“Staying here, it’ll always torture us.”

“I can’t leave. There’s my parents.”

“They’re grownups. Nobody’s forcing them to stay either.”

“I’m jobless now, and so are they.”

“Things might be better elsewhere.”

They might be worse, Dana had thought. Or it wasn’t really a thought, it was a grey fog that clamped down on her so she could barely move. She wasn’t leaving the one safe sofa in the house, her island fortress in a sea of betrayals.

“Everyone I know lives here,” she argued.

Greg didn’t meet her eyes. Damn him. He wouldn’t say it. He wouldn’t even look at her, because then she’d know what he wasn’t saying.

Melanie left.

The one person who should have understood Dana’s loss, the one person Dana should have been able to comfort. Instead, their grief made them so they couldn’t stand the sight of each other. Too many memories.

“Come on, where’s my spunky girl gone?” Greg had pleaded. “Beautiful, smart, capable, remember her?”

Dana had cried. She couldn’t, she couldn’t anymore. The mere thought of going into town made her heart lurch and run circles.

Greg wrote her a poem about her miscarriage. She screamed at him.

He cut out job ads, house ads in other cities, and brought them in with her morning coffee.

“Moving takes money,” she’d cry, if she opened her mouth at all.

“We’ve got no savings?”

That accusing look. Useless sponger, shouldn’t he have known that? said Dana’s guilt, going on the attack to cover itself up.

“You know we don’t!” Dana said.

“I thought you had another account or something. Do you mean to tell me…” The realisation crawled across his face. Horror, pity, disgust. He gestured around at their antique furniture, her collection of original art that hung on their cracked walls, all the beautiful things, the things she couldn’t resist buying, years of spending like there was no tomorrow. “You spent everything?”

“It was my money. And you never complained.”

“I never dreamed you didn’t save any!”

“You didn’t care enough to ask.”

“Why would I? You always seemed so well put together. In charge. Of course I thought you’d have a fallback plan, something put aside!”

“Oh, now you’re the one preaching practicality. Mr. Doctorate in Art History.”

But it was true. Their roles had reversed, and their marriage couldn’t survive. So a few months later, Greg said, “I’m going to fuck off, as you so kindly suggested.”

“And do what?”

“Live on the dole, if I have to. I don’t care. You’d fuck off out of this city too, if you had any sense.”

Well that was a fun trip down memory lane, Dana thinks. Just seeing Greg’s name on an email brings it back every time. She glances down. Yep, there it is. “Please come and at least look,” in the subject line where she can’t avoid seeing it.

No, he’s crazy to ask her to join him. Snakes, bushfires, spiders. What the hell is he thinking?

~*~

 

The next day, she wears trainers to work. Why even pretend? The building shakes all day. If the real thing comes, she’s going to bolt like a rabbit, and she doesn’t care who knows it.

But it’s a slog. New data has to force its way past a fog of anxiety. When was work ever this hard? It’s shameful, having to ask somebody to explain the printer three times. Her arms, her hands are all efficiency, tap tap tap type, disconnected from her body. They belong to the orderly trees of data on her screen and respond only to them. Meanwhile her stomach’s a knot, her insides are mush, her knees are watery, like she’s got some kind of weird mermaid body, only human above desk-height.

Her phone pings. It’s from EQC, everyone’s favourite acronym. Unfortunately, your house insurance…They’ve been going back and forth on this for two years.

Meanwhile her house leaks. Repairs will suck up everything she has but this job keeps at least a finger plugging the dyke.

She goes to the tea-room to compose a reply. Out the window she can see the distant mountains, not distant enough as it’s turned out. White teeth that seem unreal from here, but brutally in contention with the sky nonetheless.

This land rises, and cities fall.

The tea-room has a door to the outside with the usual sign above it, EXIT with a running figure, a universal language with a special message for Dana. She wipes her eyes, her nose, and then she can’t text with wet fingers. So she takes the hint, snatching up her bag from the desk before bolting out the door, down the stairs and outside.

She’s woken by the sound of rain drumming on the tin roof. After a dry summer, the rain will be working its way through the gaps in the corrugated sheeting, silently infecting the roof space with rot. Her eyes rest on the grey blotches on the bedroom walls that have grown floridly through the last two winters. The ceiling in one corner is starting to sag. Dana turns away, pulling the sheet up over her face. She doesn’t need reminders of winter. It’s brutal in this windy shell of a house.

Work, though. Fixing the roof is top of her list, and it’s doable in just a few paychecks.

Did anyone see her run out? She could go back.

She curls up smaller under the blankets. Who’s she trying to kid?

Later that morning she’s woken again by the clank of the letterbox lid. It must be a parcel; something too big to fit through the slot. Once she’s awake it’s impossible to ignore the slow leaks tapping the floor all over the house like stealthy fingers. Dana gets up and puts out bowls and buckets to catch them.

The open cupboard by the sink mocks her with its emptiness. Greg might have been happy to live with mismatched sets of china, but Dana wasn’t. She’d taken the survivors and hurled them into a rubbish skip.

“Some cups are better than none,” he’d pointed out. “They’re not less beautiful if you don’t have the complete set.”

But they were. She hated them, hated the broken ones, hated the mismatched remainders, hated the mess they’d made when they hit the floor, hated the incompleteness and damage and imperfection. The smash of crockery was the best sound she’d heard in months, and she put her shoulders into it, bowling cups and plates into the skip. Old muscles woke that she hadn’t used since school cricket. They’d been a stellar team, thanks to Dana and her lethal bowling. Absolute winners.

After that she’d become smaller, though. Shoulders hunched, eyes averted from Greg’s pity.

From the sink, she retrieves the one mug she’s kept. It’s an oddball hand-thrown gift from Greg. It’s past time she should buy something that won’t remind her of Greg. She can browse Dolce Vita. They have nice things, it will cheer her up.

A loud “plink” into the nearest bucket reminds her of the paycheck she won’t be getting.

Screw it. She’s only ever going to need this one mug.

Around midday, a respite in the rain means she can go out and see what’s in the letterbox. It’s a big document package; probably something to do with the class action against the insurance company.

She perches on a stool in the kitchen next to the recycling bin, where she will shortly file the contents of this parcel. “What fresh hell is this?” she mutters, slicing it open.

Instead of paper, a sheaf of bright glossy photos slides out, spreading themselves quickly across the bench like a winning hand. She knows what they are but can’t look away in time, and they hook her in.

In the rain-grey light of the kitchen, their wide blue skies and golden wheatfields blaze with colour and warmth. She sees a flat land, arable and friendly, with a modest town of modern buildings close to the ground. There’s Greg, tanned, the shadow of worry gone from his face.

There’s a note on the back of that one. “Nothing’s perfect. But if you’re willing to try again, I am too. And if we do, I swear we can make it better.”

Nothing’s perfect. Why does he start with a warning? Because he’s honest. Because he knows Dana better than anyone, and knows she’d rather choke to death on perfection than risk the unknown. It’s the tail end of a hundred conversations that haven’t ended well, but only because she hasn’t been willing to listen.

Dana rests her face in her hands. Her eyes are hot with tears, but they’re tears from a new kind of pain, the kind where something inside you turns over to settle at last in its right place.

Smart, capable, confident…That’s a lie, for as long as she remains in this city of memories, this disaster of a house, pretending she’s in charge of her life.

She reaches for her phone.

The plane breaks through the clouds. Below, there are no thrusting mountains of a land endlessly kneaded to rise like new bread. Just stubby hills as worn down as the tread on a pair of favourite shoes. Dana flies over a golden country that smiles like an old woman whose face has been softened by the years into kind wrinkles.