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themselves on the platform at the top of the old fire lookout tree. For a few weeks, Elijah made extra pocket money climbing up and down the spiral peg ladder, carrying food and water on the way up and foul-smelling buckets on the way down.
    It didn’t last. Because in the end the engineers and the politicians all agreed. Lower Grange had to go.
    The settlers hadn’t thought it through, you see. Eighty-eight years earlier, they had thought it was the perfect spot for a town. They hadn’t realised it was actually the perfect spot for a dam which would irrigate the whole region, the whole bustling network of towns and farms that would come along years later and grow bigger and busier and more water-hungry than Lower Grange itself would ever be. It was progress and you couldn’t stand in the way of it. If you did, you’d get swallowed by a giant wall of water.
    Hannah shot me a look. “I know about all that stuff, Cass. I was
there
, remember? It’s a matter of choosing what’s most important.” She scrolled idly back and forth with the mouse. “I think we’re pretty much set now. We’ve narrowed it down to what we need.”
    I nodded. Not because I agreed but because I knew what she was talking about. Someone getting to choose. Somebody narrowing things down. It was like Mum was always telling her classes. I had seen her scrawling it across their essays in her wild, looping handwriting:
Dig deeper. Remember – history is written by the winners!
    Or maybe it was like me telling Ellen that I was sorry. That I was just looking, that Dad’s pottery had slipped.
    Each of those things was true. But put together, they didn’t tell the real story. There were cracks in between where important stuff leaked out. It’s a funny thing, an unsettling thing – how you can tell the truth and have it still be a lie.
    “Yeah,” I began, “but what about …” I stopped. There was a crunch of gravel as a car came round the bend into our driveway much too fast.
    Tourists!
I thought. It was hard to see through the shower of dirt and tiny stones thrown up as the car braked outside, but I knew that’s who it would be. They come out here accidentally sometimes, taking a wrong turn on their way to the tearoom. They flatten the tiny wildflowers on the side of the road, spray dust all over Mum’s washing, then get cranky with us because we’re not a genuine copy of a rustic historical cottage serving Devonshire tea.
    There was a loud banging on the front door. I leaned back on my chair and looked down the hall. That way, I wouldn’t even have to get up. I could just yell directions to Ye Olde Tearoom and tell them no, we absolutely definitely could not just whip them up a batch of country-style scones.
    Instead, the door to the studio swung open and Dad elbowed his way into the hall like a surgeon going into an operation, his hands slick with clay.
    “Howard!” he said. “Come in, come in.”
    I stared down the hall. Finkle? What was he doing here?
    That man really was everywhere.
    There was a photo of him right there on the screen, one that looked like it had been taken about twenty years ago, when he still had hair. He was resting his chin on one balled-up fist, evidently trying to appear thoughtful. There was a caption underneath: “Howard Finkle, Centenary Mayor”.
    “Hello, girls!” he called down the hall. Then he clapped Dad on the back and followed him into the studio, the door slamming shut behind them.
    That was when I realised.
    Finkle’s oddly crooked nose – not unlike a random blob of mashed clay which could possibly be something someone had left there by accident.
    I turned to Hannah. She was grinning.
    “Commemorative sculpture,” she said. “Also my idea. Howard loves it. Dad loves it. Everybody wins.”
    Mum sighed. “Not if Dad doesn’t get all his pots finished in time for the holidays. I can’t believe you’ve got him making a free head right before the busy season, Hannah.”
    Hannah clicked the