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The room was “neat as a pin” (her mother had always been a very “neat as a pin” person).

The bed was immaculate, with beautifully laundered sheets of white waffle cotton.

On the bedside table was a Rosamunde Pilcher novel with a Nightcliff Public Library bookmark a quarter of the way in.

It was two weeks overdue. The short-sleeve blouses she’d had tailored in Jakarta hung neatly pressed in her wardrobe.

Her pearls and delicate gold watch lay in a dish on the dresser.

Next to it was a picture of Dan and Mum in a rickshaw (rickshaws only carried two passengers).

The en suite was scented with the lavender soap Judith Bower unaccountably hoarded.

“I don’t think I can sleep in here.” Tears were streaming down Dan’s face.

“I will,” Coralie said. “You can move back into your room.”

They changed the sheets on both beds and moved their things around.

Afterward, Dan went to the garden to smoke a cigarette.

Coralie tackled the kitchen. In the fridge, the milk was off.

Dirty dishes were piled up in the sink from the few ad hoc meals they’d managed.

She eyed them with her mother’s critical gaze, then eyed herself with that gaze too.

She’d had such a long break from it, that gaze.

Being with Adam had been one long holiday from shame.

Now she cringed, shriveled inside, and raised one shoulder as if warding off a blow. How interesting.

She filled one half of the stainless-steel sink with hot water and added a toxic green squirt of Morning Fresh.

She slipped her hands (her mother’s hands) into her mother’s yellow washing-up gloves.

A perfect fit. She washed and rinsed every plate and would have dried them, too, but Dan joined her with a tea towel and stacked them all away.

Afterward, they took some beers down to the foreshore to check up on the Miracle Tree. Coralie remembered it from years ago. It was right on the edge of the slowly eroding cliff, its roots now fully exposed. “It’s really clinging on for dear life,” Dan said.

“For dear life,” Coralie repeated. “I’ve never paid attention to those words before.”

“To dear life.” He held out his beer, and they clinked.

“Why do you think you’re crying so much, and I can hardly cry at all? Maybe it’s because…” Mum never really loved me , Coralie was going to say.

“I’m a massive poof?” Dan said, and (as the sun set dramatically around them) she found she couldn’t stop laughing.

She couldn’t remember her childhood before him. She could hardly remember it after. What if they’d been able to grow up together? How much better it might have been.

They didn’t have the air con on at night, just fans. Through the open windows, in their separate rooms, they could smell frangipani, hear geckos clicking, and the sea.

···

As Darwin became more real, London seemed farther away. She woke to a long and funny email from Adam about how awful the election had been. Worst of all, Tom had won Eastbourne, and people on Twitter were saying they quite fancied him.

Coralie couldn’t reply. She didn’t want to write about what was happening, and not happening, in the hospital. Just like her mother, she didn’t want to think too much.

···

Dan drove her to Chemist Warehouse at Casuarina.

“What kind does she like?” Coralie asked. “Adult nappies.”

“They’re called, like…I don’t know. Reliability Pants or Be Safes or something. Backups. Something like that.”

“She’s so discreet, isn’t she? Never a hint of what’s going on inside.”

“She’s just a tiny, tidy little bird.”

She bought four extra-large packs of Depends, enough for two weeks or more.

Dan watched as she threw them on the back seat. “Optimistic.”

There was a beep on Coralie’s phone. “Oh, it’s Mum.” She slid into the passenger seat and read out the message: “Cor, Palliative Care have called. A room is available. They’re moving me up this afternoon. C U soon.”

Dan got out of the car and slammed the door.

“Palliative Cor,” she couldn’t help joking to no one.

After five minutes, Dan came back with a pink face.

They drove back to the hospital in silence.

···

Coralie busied herself wrapping her mother’s flowers in pages of the NT News . There was a funny story about a juvenile crocodile that had gotten into Parap Pool. She took a photo of it. “I’m just sending this to Adam for Zora,” she narrated.

“Who?” her mother grunted, or perhaps “Why?”

“Zora? Adam’s daughter? My sort-of stepdaughter? I miss her so much.”

Her mother murmured something into the pillow.

“What’s that, Mum?”

“You’re not married,” her mother said. “She’s not your anything.”

“But,” Coralie said, her eyes filling with tears, “I do love her.”

“Easy to be lovey-dovey about someone else’s child,” her mother said. “Wait till you have one of your own.”

“What do you mean?” Coralie said. “Mum, what do you mean?”

But there was no reply.

“Mum?” Coralie said later.

“Mmm.”

“Don’t you think it’s unfair?”

“What?”

Coralie gestured around the room. “All this.”

The words were spoken; they were in the air. They hung there. With no one to catch them, they drifted away, lost.

···

Soon after, Jerome came with the wheelchair. “Judith, your chariot.”

They all piled into a car for the short journey. It was just a regular car, without hospital branding. Was it Jerome’s? There was nothing of Mum to put the seatbelt over. She was two-dimensional, like a T-shirt drying on the line.

Outside the hospital café, a willowy Aboriginal woman pulled down one side of her colorful sundress to breastfeed a roly-poly baby. The baby’s hand rose and waved. The mother looked down and the baby cupped her chin. The mother kissed the baby’s palm.

Coralie looked away.

“Judith,” Jerome said at the hospice, “you were a wonderful patient.”

Coralie wondered if the past tense struck a wrong note. But their mother gave a gracious tilt of the head, a celeb importuned by a fan.

···

That night, Dan went on a longer run than usual, and the next day, when Coralie got up early, she saw Jerome in her mother’s living room putting on his backpack and tiptoeing out the door.

···

Back in London, the stuff from storage had been redelivered, a surprise to the builders and Adam (and to Coralie, who’d forgotten).

Oneal sent her a picture of the newly painted sitting room, filled to chest height with box after box of books, all jumbled with boxes of kitchen things.

The sofa was, for some reason, on its side.

The person who had packed those boxes, herself of four months earlier, no longer seemed to exist.

When Stefan sent her gossip from the office, she couldn’t quite picture the scene.

I wish I could be with you! Adam emailed every day. CYK, CYK, CYK. He could be with her. By getting on a plane. Oh well.

Her mother hadn’t eaten since being transferred to the hospice, and neither, Coralie suddenly realized after a week, had she.

She sat by the bed reading Rachel Cusk, feeling as blank as the narrator in Outline . When her mother woke, she put the book down. “Mum? Did you say something? Do you need me?”

Her mother’s face contorted. She was repelled. “No!”

Dan went in at night, jogging along the Dripstone Cliffs.

Coralie came in early each morning to relieve him.

He was broken, his face a mask of horror.

“She gets so scared. She’s terrified, lying there alone in the dark.

Sometimes she’s calling for me: ‘Dan, Dan.’ She doesn’t realize—I’m right there holding her hand. ”

···

One morning, she woke to a question from human resources. How much longer would she be “on leave”? On leave? They made it sound like a holiday.

At the hospice, she poked her head around the door to the manager’s office. She was at her desk, eating bircher muesli and watching highlights of Formula 1. Coralie suddenly understood the meaning of the phrase “in rude health.” “Katherine? How much longer does my mum have?”

“She’s not drinking much?”

“Not really.”

“I’d say we’re in the home straight.”

She went into her mother’s room. The colorful blanket, crocheted by volunteers, had slid half off the bed. Coralie adjusted it and smoothed her mother’s hair away from her face. Her skin was waxy like a candle. These weeks had been very cruel.

In the vinyl recliner at the back of the room, Dan startled awake. “Oh, Cor,” he said. “The morning.”

“Was it a bad night?”

“No, a lot better. Quieter. Maybe they have the drugs right. She gave my hand a squeeze. I think she knew it was me.”

“She definitely knew.” Dan put his headphones in. “Have a nice jog,” Coralie said. He gave her a gently ironic salute.

She leaned over the bed and spoke in a clear, soft voice. “Mum? It’s me, Coralie. Don’t worry, ignore me. I’ll just be sitting next to you.”

She wrote to HR, telling them she’d be back at her desk in two weeks.

An uncommon feeling overcame her: Take it or leave it .

They could stop her pay. They could end her employment, undermining the whole basis of her visa and her right to live in the UK.

She could wave goodbye to Wilton Way, to Adam, and to Zora.

Would that be so bad? Her mother was dying, and Coralie was on the other side of the world, alone.

Should she have specifically asked Adam to come?

Please be with me instead of writing your election book.

She couldn’t do that. She shouldn’t have to.

It struck her that she’d invested her life savings into renovating a house she didn’t own: a non-feminist and life-ruining error so huge it was almost funny.

On the plus side, most of her stuff was already packed—Adam could just ship it.

But to where? Perhaps she’d be here forever, sitting at a deathbed in a hospice.

When she looked up, she realized she hadn’t heard any breaths for a while. She waited for a minute, and then another minute. There were none.