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I’m becoming a woman, with a woman’s body. I marvelled at the swell and curve and breadth of it. Carrying another being inside me, an explorer in unknown territory. A living landscape on my skin; the crazy tracery of veins under the surface, bumps and cracks and lines like an early cartographer’s map of a new world. For the first time, I was excited by the idea of these changes. No matter I looked older, riper. I could accept now that this was happening to me.
    Of course, the situation was unbearable. But the illusion that it was only temporary, that it must change somehow, even if we didn’t yet know how, made it slightly more tolerable for all three of us. Zoi didn’t know what to think, or what it was he should be objecting to, and grew more and more torn between the desire to act and his denial of the irrevocable, convincing himself that once the baby came all would be forgotten. Dimitri only let himself live from moment to moment, from the time he saw me alone to the next time we were together. The long black stretches of time between those moments were ephemeral. And the birth of the baby couldn’t intrude.
    And I, who tortured myself with the sense of it all being my fault; that the happiness of three – no, four – people was on my shoulders, merely waited for my child to be born and for some action, some solution to become inevitable. What would make it so inevitable, I wasn’t exactly sure. I wasn’t even clear who the father was. So I thought of the child as solely mine: an immaculate conception. And I comforted myself with the idea that something must shatter, something must change, and I’d be able to leave the pieces behind and go home with my baby. My baby: nobody else’s. In truth, none of us knew how this change would take shape, this change that would reveal all and relieve us of our suffering, but we hoped for it in secret, and smiled at each other with suspicion on our faces.
    NOW I GO back to bed, willing some rest. Pan kept me up last night with a bout of coughing and a stuffy nose. I took him into my bed, now I watch him sleep, smelling his pallid, milky damp on my pillow. The customary Sydney traffic is muted, the city hushed as if falling asleep itself under a blanket of drizzle.
    Whenever I’m alone, I think of Zoi. It’s always the Zoi he was when we first met, as if the Zoi of Athens was an anomaly, a perversion of what I perceived as his true self. He hounded me toward the end, made me relive the betrayal, blame myself. He trawled with me through the intimacy of detail, its sick splendour. Did you have sex with my brother? Yes. Did you come? No, I lied. When was the first time? It doesn’t matter. How could you do it? I don’t know.
    There was one thing about Dimitri, when he held me he was really there. Unlike Zoi, who was mostly absent in some fundamental way, forever thinking, dreaming of our future together, yet careless of the present. For Dimitri there was no future together: so in the moment, the breath, the flesh, lay eternity. Even if he was looking away from me, even when he was asleep, he couldn’t forget I was there. The delicious state of knowing I slept in the next room or close beside him kept his every nerve heightened. His thoughts bled into my dreams. His hands on me were like two eyes. Even the pressure of his thumb on my waist as he slept during our brief daytime interludes was conscious, scrutinised, balletic. If I showed him some small affection, his body stopped, frozen, listening for my desire. In the end Zoi didn’t have that capacity, didn’t want to have it, maybe never did; and I resented him for it.
    I bought flowers for the house yesterday in a fit of extravagance, preparing for Zoi’s arrival without admitting it. I took Pan with me to the grower’s markets and watched as he pointed and exclaimed over blooms and fruits. He chose freesias in pastel hues, mandarins and limes,