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the cooking type. His wife, meanwhile, prepared hearty, home-cooked, three-course meals on a nightly basis.
    ‘We’ll go out tomorrow night, I promise,’ Andy said. He seemed sincere about it. ‘I’ll take you somewhere nice.’
    So we can celebrate our last night.
    She smiled. ‘Consider that a deal.’
    ‘I’ll be home in a couple of hours.’
    ‘See ya, boys,’ Mak replied and stepped back from the cruiser.
    They drove off.
    ‘Fuck,’ she said to the quiet street.
    Mak stood for a moment with her arms crossed, feeling the breeze whip around her. She felt a long way from home, and she had begun to question the wisdom of the choices that had taken her so far away. Looking back, she could see how it had happened, step by inevitable step. The years had mapped out a roller-coaster of emotions anddifficult decisions, and now she was here in Sydney, Australia, so far from her birthplace. In her dreams, things had run a lot more smoothly. In her dreams, she and Andy shared normal, simple domestic bliss—although one that didn’t involve her doing any cooking. In her dreams she had not abandoned her widowed father in the country of her birth.
    ‘It will work itself out,’ she muttered under her breath. ‘It always does.’
    She loved Andy. Where there was love, there was a way, right?
    Mak walked back inside and locked the door behind her. She snatched her backpack off the bench and strode through the open doorway of the dining room, throwing the pack on the table in front of the empty plates. It skidded along the oak and knocked over a candle, spilling a teaspoon of white wax on the surface of the wood.
    Wait.
    She had closed the dining room door after Andy arrived home, but the door was now open…So Andy had seen the dining table laid out.
    Great. That’s just great.
    With little feeling of occasion, Mak poured a glass of the Merlot and swigged it down like grape juice. Grumbling to herself, she then dished up a couple of ladles’ worth of the penne from the microwave. Her cooking had not gained any appeal in the interim, sadly. The little pasta pieces looked suspiciously like tyre tread. She brought one forkful to her lips. She tasted. She lowered herfork. Then she took her bowl back to the kitchen and slid the starchy contents into the bin.
    Mak poured herself a bowl of cereal instead, and she ate it by candlelight while she flipped through the real estate listings in the Wentworth Courier , in search of affordable office space for her psychology practice. Thus far there was little that was affordable in any suburbs she might conceivably wish to work from. It would come with time, she hoped. She had to try to be patient.
    And if you move to Canberra when Andy gets back, you’ll have to start looking all over again…
    She polished off her unsatisfying bowl of cereal—which tasted at odds with the wine—and she called Karen Mahoney to tell her how unsuccessful her attempt at pasta had been.
    Karen didn’t answer. She, like Mak’s boyfriend, was working overtime on this particular Thursday night.
    What a waste.
    Detective Constable Karen Mahoney stood at the feet of a recently deceased young woman, observing the scene of her death, police notepad and pen in hand. It was a Thursday night, and Karen had just been looking forward to going home when the call came in to the Homicide Squad. Now she found herself in this sad one-bedroom apartment, taking in every bit ofinformation she could to piece together what had happened.
    About an hour earlier, nearby Kings Cross Police Station had received two complaints from separate neighbours about the sounds of a violent argument. When they sent a couple of connies over, the boys had found much more than the expected domestic disagreement. The tenant, a young woman, had received multiple stab wounds to the chest. The officers said she was already dead when they arrived.
    An as-yet-unidentified young man was also in the apartment at the time, seeming to be disoriented,