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anxiously rubbing the area above his right eyebrow.
    ‘I don’t know,’ I admit.
    ‘Exactly, there is nothing you could have done differently, none of this is your fault. Do you want me to come over?’
    ‘No, it’s fine. I’m so grateful, though, that you don’t blame me.’
    ‘Of course I don’t. Joel wouldn’t have, either. Please listen, Saff, this isn’t your fault, and you know yourself that there’s nothing you could have done to change it.’
    ‘Yeah, you’re right. Night, Fynn.’
    ‘Night.’
    I must have sounded convincing to him because he didn’t keep me on the phone, insisting we talk, he didn’t insist on coming over to reassure me in person. It was almost believable that I don’t know how I could have stopped this happening.
    It’s obvious, though. No matter which way I try to spin it, look at it, take an alternative view – this wouldn’t be happening if Joel was around. Phoebe’s slow decline into this wouldn’t have occurred if I hadn’t got her father killed.

IV
    Slugs have been nibbling at my plants.
    It goes through phases when it’s fine and there’s no sign of them, and then I’ll go out to water my ‘crop’ of vegetables first thing in the morning before work and the silvery, slimy evidence of something unwelcome will glisten up at me. This morning, it seems the slugs have had an orgy on the vegetable plot, despite the carefully laid border of broken eggshells. Maybe I wasn’t diligent enough, maybe there was one that had been a Trojan horse, hiding under the spinach leaves, which then made plans to admit the others once my back was turned, because they have decimated the area. Where the spinach grows is obviously where they partied the most – I’m sure if I look hard enough I’ll find tiny discarded beer bottles, Rizla papers and condom wrappers.
    It’s after nine, Phoebe hasn’t surfaced and I didn’t bother to wake her. I had to organise things for the day, take another day off work – even though my compassionate leave from all that time ago somehow segued into being part of my annual leave over two business years and it’s still frowned upon if I take
any
time off. Kevin, my boss, who is Director of Operations, paused a long time earlier when I told him I had a medical emergency and had to take today off as well. With icicles hanging off his every syllable, he asked if I’d
definitely
be in tomorrow. In reply, I’d wanted to sing a couple of lines about no one knowing what tomorrow would bring from ‘Love Lifts Us Up Where We Belong’, and a better man would have appreciated it, would have laughed. Instead, I’d crossed my fingers behind my back, even though he couldn’t actually see me, and said, ‘Yes, of course.’
    Then I’d made an appointment for Phoebe with the doctor. Despiteme calling at one minute past eight (when the appointment lines opened at eight), I’d ended up with six people ahead of me in the queue, and the doctor she normally saw was booked up.
    I couldn’t take any more judgement from semi-strangers, at least I knew Phoebe’s doctor well enough to withstand her scorn, so I’d made her an appointment for the next day, and then I’d called Zane before he left for school. We live one street away from the school, literally around the corner, so I’d been tempted to go and wait for him outside school so I could hug him, hold him, remind myself that he was all right. I’d failed with the older one, but the younger one was all right. I couldn’t, though, because that would mortify him, me acting the crazy mother in front of his friends. Instead, I’d settled for speaking to him on the phone, checking he was behaving, checking he’d done his homework, checking he knew how much I loved him. Irritation ran like a throbbing vein through every ‘Yes, Mum’ he’d uttered. I smiled after each one, that irritation told me he was indeed all right.
    And now I am here, kneeling in front of the vegetables in the shady part of the