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She’d googled the agency before the interview and got the sense of its founder as a guru.

In his late fifties by then, he was universally considered at his peak.

She soon learned firsthand that if there was a rule, or a convention, Richard Pickard broke it.

Why meet clients in person when he could kayak across the harbor shouting at his Bluetooth?

Why work in his office when he could be up on the roof terrace tending to his bees?

He relished being elusive; he loved being “off the clock.” Bringing him a pedestrian concern, especially about budget or admin, could ruin his entire day, and ruin the bringer’s day, too, because of the shouting.

So could asking him the wrong question, or not having the right size printouts of his concepts, or not intuiting that he needed downtime , or scheduling him downtime when what he needed was a crisis, a conflict, or a compliment (ideally a prize with a trophy) .

On the rare occasions he consented to sit in front of his computer, he tick-tick-tick ed away like the timer on a bomb.

Almost from her first day, Coralie alone could separate out the different colored wires and defuse him.

It was second nature, instinctive: She knew what he needed, how to give it to him, and how to manage him.

They were a great team, and they won a lot of big jobs, awards, and bonuses.

At least, he won the bonuses—she was on a salary.

He was the boss of the world, and at his feet, on a tiny pedestal engraved Richard’s Muse , sat Coralie.

The night outside was stormy and the restaurant very warm; a mist had formed on the window and the lights of passing cars glittered in the drops. Adam nodded at the rest of her lamb and rice. “Are you going to eat that?”

She was sharing some of the worst parts of her life—and still he wanted her scraps. She gratefully swapped their plates.

In Sydney, her work became her life. Richard was work.

Richard was life. She accompanied him everywhere, calming him when he was angry and buoying him when he was low.

She helped him with what he called getting his mind down : transforming diffuse vibes and insights into something that could be packaged and sold.

Or “Coralie, Coralie,” he’d beg, “close my tabs.” Closing his tabs meant running through his day, his diary, and his works in progress with him and quieting his racing mind.

Or be my sounding board , he’d say, and she’d make herself available to listen to his riffs, idea after idea based on whatever obsessed him at the time: kintsugi, the ancient art of repairing the cracks in pottery with gold; the way Glenn Gould hummed along to the piano in his Goldberg Variations .

“I resonate with that,” he’d say about every piece of stimulus, instead of “That resonates with me.” He seemed to spend all his time resonating—physically vibrating with his own artistry and passion.

Richard was the tuning fork; she was the dull object he tapped to make a sound.

She woke every day to five, ten, fifteen texts from him.

She kept her phone in the kitchen at night.

When work took them interstate, at first they used dinner to get his mind down.

Then he liked Coralie to close his tabs in person, a nightcap at the hotel bar.

Then he couldn’t go to sleep until she’d put him to bed, which meant going into his room to make sure the space was okay (no overwhelming scents, no strange noises) and closing his tabs in the lounge area of his suite.

Then putting him to bed meant being present in the room till he was ready to drop off.

Then putting him to bed meant doing all that while stroking his forehead.

Then it also meant giving him “a cuddle.”

“Yes, I have to say,” Adam said mildly, “I’m really not liking the sound of this guy.”

Her mother had to have her second, much scarier cancer op, and Richard gave Coralie two weeks off work so she could be there.

But: I can’t live without you , he texted.

What are you doing to me? I haven’t felt like this in a very long time.

No one’s done this to me before. I’m utterly entranced by you.

I’m totally in your power. These were the kinds of messages he was sending her—messages she was receiving in recovery, where her mother’s staples split and the white sheet that covered her suddenly turned red.

“As I suspected,” Adam said. “I hate him.”

She returned to find him on the doorstep of her Elizabeth Bay apartment building.

He was desperate, out of his mind, in tears; he was dying, he couldn’t manage.

Terrified, she hustled him into the lobby.

Instantly revived, he bounded up eight flights of stairs without becoming breathless.

He conducted an energetic and hilarious tour of her small one-bedroom flat, emerging onto her pride and joy, her tiny balcony, with its view of the sparkling azure sea.

“Your own little piece of the harbor,” he exclaimed, reminding her that his own seafront mansion (which he shared with his wife and three kids) had a pool and a jetty for their boat.

Yet despite the mansion, the wife, and the three children, it was Coralie he said he wanted, and as the day grew dark around them, he won from her first a declaration of responsibility, then of care.

And attraction? Well, she supposed sometimes attraction.

He was ecstatic; she restrained him. He was devastated; she embraced him.

Finally, it seemed as though she had achieved the almost-impossible, a triumph of sensitivity and influence: He would depart her house knowing that she wanted to but, alas, couldn’t .

His hand was on the door handle. One kiss, he said, and he’d stay forever silent.

She kissed him. He tasted like the silt at the bottom of a fish tank. He hauled her toward her bedroom.

“I want to kill this guy,” Adam said. “I want to murder him.”

She managed it! She solved it! She put a stop to it!

But the stopping of it made him cry, then stride around the flat, shouting and hitting himself.

He was disgusting, an animal, she was right to hate him.

I don’t hate you , she said, I care about you .

The whole thing started again. After midnight he was on her balcony, threatening to jump off and screaming that she was a cocktease.

She sat paralyzed on the sofa, sobbing. She found out afterward the neighbors called the police.

Officers banged on the door. Richard was swaggering, charming, joking: “Don’t shoot!

” He had everyone laughing as they escorted him down the stairs.

But on Monday, he wasn’t at work. The day passed in a haze of fear.

Richard was in jail, or he was dead—her selfishness had killed him.

That afternoon, as she left the office, a woman rushed up to her, shaking.

“You’re ruining his life—my life. Do you understand?

I’ve seen your messages to him. You’re sick.

You’re trash .” Someone from the office came outside for a smoke.

Richard’s wife waited for them to move on.

Then she leaned in toward Coralie, so close that Coralie could see individual strands of her expensive blonde foils.

“Get your own husband,” she hissed. “Get your own family.” In spite of herself, with a visceral sense of self-harm, Coralie waited politely for her parting words, which the woman delivered with pure disgust: “FUCKING HOMEWRECKER.”

It had been a major part of Richard’s persona that his agency was boutique , a “shop.” It was also, however, important to him that his work was seen as “global.” For this reason, he’d cultivated a loose networking arrangement with a similar agency in Portland, Oregon, and another in Clerkenwell, London.

It was to this office that human resources suggested she might like to transfer.

“Cultural exchange,” they called it, though there was no talk of her return.

They’d pay out her Elizabeth Bay lease. They’d pay for her relocation.

Her salary was equivalent, in GBP, to her salary in AUD, and it was made clear just how generous this was in post–financial crisis Britain.

It was an offer she couldn’t refuse! (She didn’t have a choice.)

“Coffee? Pudding?” The waiter was back and keen to talk to Adam about football.

Coralie escaped to the bathroom and cradled her head in her hands.

When she thought about that period in her life, she felt repulsive—a wormlike creature writhing in the mud.

She hadn’t returned to the office; it had been clear she wasn’t welcome.

The contents of her desk (her packets of green tea and seaweed crisps, her tampons and her lip balms) had been couriered to her flat.

Had Richard cast her out, or had his wife somehow insisted?

Did human resources know the truth? What was the truth, actually?

She’d inhabited her role as Richard’s offsider so intensely that, without him, it was as if she didn’t exist. Sometimes she heard her phone ping, but when she checked it, there was nothing.

Her Facebook status announcing her “next adventure” had been a triumph of the copywriter’s art.

Despite the ninety-seven Likes, she’d closed the door on her third home in under two years with a sense of shame so total it was almost annihilating.

And then, once in London, her loneliness had been unspeakable—she felt that now with new force. How had she survived?

When she returned to the dining room, Adam was staring past the condensation on the window to make out the street scene beyond. Two chocolate mousses sat before him, the dark kind with olive oil and salt. He pushed one toward her. “Please don’t let me eat both of these.”

“So that’s the story, basically.” Coralie sat down. “Richard’s wife called me a homewrecker, but the only home I wrecked was my own.”

“Now, just hold on!” Adam threw down his napkin and joined her on her side of the table. “You’re using some very active verbs here. Coralie.” He took both her hands in his. “You didn’t wreck anything. You didn’t do anything. That guy needs his lights punched out!”

The waiter came over to the window with a tea towel. “Let’s see if we can mop this up.” He swept it across the glass, clearing up the view.

That was what being with Adam was like. He wiped the slate clean. Everything was new.

And if she felt like a door had closed somewhere, that a complex experience was being tidied away without being fully understood, that she was alone in still interrogating it—that was a small price to pay for his acceptance, his support, his love.

···

In the Wilton Way house, Coralie took the odd little nothing-room with the boxes and the yoga mat as her own private study.

She taped off the skirtings and the window frame and painted the walls in Nancy’s Blushes.

She let Adam escort her around IKEA, introducing her to the miracle of shelves.

They knocked a wall of Billy bookcases together and stacked up her new (old) books.

Her desk she found on Parkholme Road; she covered it in paint stripper and scraped it down to the pine.

Once installed in her pink room, she placed a new journal front and center on the desk with the intention, finally, of Writing with a capital W .

But Zora found the notebook, liked it, stole it, and scrawled on the cover

ZORA

PRIVAT

BOOK

—so Coralie let her keep it.

Over the fireplace in the sitting room, she hung Bowerbird Making a Nest , a colorful painting by an Indigenous woman artist from South East Arnhem Land.

She’d had to unroll the canvas carefully and stretch it; it had spent four years stored in a tube.

She’d bought the picture as a present to herself after the breakup with Josh.

It wasn’t just because her surname was Bower; she liked the birds themselves, so called because the male builds an intricate, beautiful, perfect home to lure the female.

Adam smiled, satisfied. “Just like I did for you.”

Well, sort of. Coralie loved the Wilton Way house, but it was not without its flaws.

Leaves from the neighbor’s tree clogged the kitchen gutters so comprehensively that heavy rain streamed down the inside wall.

Multiple split floorboards bounced like trampolines.

(“Maybe try to avoid,” Adam said.) Filling the kettle, she found stalagmites and stalactites of limescale.

(“Hard water, minerals—good for the hair and teeth!”) The cupboard under the sink had a horrible hospital smell.

(TCP, a liquid antiseptic—Adam’s mother, a retired GP, made him gargle it when he was ill.) There was also the issue of the Tasmania-shaped sepia stain on the ceiling above the boiler cupboard.

Still, she agreed. “Exactly like you did for me.”

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you.”

And she did. She had made it. She was home.