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away at the window, getting louder and louder until she thought it might hail. She stood to check, but there was nothing settling on the lawn. The sky flashed and then thunder rolled across the city, a boom that spread, then broke up. It was a nice change from the rumbling that had been coming from under the hills in recent weeks.
    One grandson, Tony, had wanted to move in with Marjorie after the September earthquake, not because his house was damaged but because, he said, he didn’t want her to be afraid. Marjorie knew, though, that Tony was seeing a business opportunity and was planning to rent his house to those whose houses were uninhabitable. Although she approved of his initiative, she wasn’t about to allow him to gain a foothold in her own home.
    Marjorie had convinced her children that she would be fine on her own, she had lived through the Blitz, she said, and the earthquakes were much less frightening. Eventually, they accepted that and left her alone to the peace of her own house. But she was scared. It was unnerving waking in the night to a rumble coming from beneath the hills, hearing it before feeling it, then hearing the sound of the house’s joints creaking. The Blitz was personal, the Germans dropping bombs on them, wiping out families, neighbourhoods, livelihoods. And through the years, everything she had faced was personal, someone trying to take business from the family, someone trying to take advantage of one of her children or grandchildren, to get one over on the family. She could face those things, see the enemy, figure out a strategy, a way to turn the tables and get one over on them. But this quake business was impersonal, she just happened to be sitting atop a part of the earth that was breaking, slowly but inexorably, assuming a new shape, oblivious to the tiny beings scurrying around on the surface.
    She had told her family she was sleeping well, and that was true, until there was an aftershock. Then she was wide awake, not waiting with dread for the next quake, but awake and thinking about her family, past and present, worrying about what the future held.
    Marjorie knew she didn’t have much time left. She needed to make decisions about how her holdings would be distributed once she was gone. The question was: How did she want to be remembered? What sort of future did she want to set up for those she was leaving behind? She wasn’t sure. She had made too many compromises over the years to feel truly comfortable with the past, overlooked the decisions Bill had made that had disadvantaged others. Yes, he had made those decisions, but she had done nothing to stop him, because she didn’t want to lose everything.
    There had been the Drakes. Greg was a chippie and he and Bill had known each other from school. Bill had given him work over the years, but Greg had a drinking problem, as many did after the war, and he found it difficult to work consistently. Money was increasingly tight and so Bill offered to buy his house and land. It was a lovely piece of land at the bottom of the Port Hills, west of the city, land that had not yet been developed into housing. It wasn’t a great price, but it was enough to get Greg and his family out of the hole they were in and into a smaller property. What Greg hadn’t known was that the land was going to be rezoned, and Bill was able to exert pressure on his mates in the council and get it rezoned quickly once the sale was complete. Had Greg held on for another couple of years, the zoning change would’ve gone through and he would have been able to subdivide the land himself. Instead, it was Bill who made a killing on the subdivision and development of the land.
    Until the earthquakes started, Marjorie hadn’t thought about Greg Drake for at least a decade. His son had come to see her once, in the 1990s, shortly after Bill died. He was angry. Knowing his parents’ financial position, the son said, Bill should have used his influence to push through the