‘I might have broken up your marriage,’ said Savannah.
‘Well, yes,’ said Joy. ‘That was a terrible thing to do. You must promise to never do anything like that ever again, because some marriages couldn’t survive an accusation like that, but you know, I never believed for one moment that Stan harassed you.’
‘I didn’t mean that,’ said Savannah. ‘I meant what I told him about you and sending Harry away.’
It was true that Savannah may well have ended her marriage with that revelation. ‘Well, yes, but that wasn’t a secret anyone asked you to keep,’ Joy said to her. ‘That was entirely my own doing. To be honest, I never expected it to stay a secret as long as it did.’
Savannah sighed as if Joy really didn’t get it. ‘Okay, but I’m not a nice person.’
It felt like she was trying to tell Joy something more than she was saying, as if there was a hidden message in her words, and if Joy concentrated hard enough she’d be able to decipher it, but all she saw was a very damaged young girl who had been dealt an awful hand in life, who had come to her house and cooked and cleaned for her.
Joy waited for Savannah to tell her whatever she wanted to tell her. She could feel her desire to speak, the way she’d once felt her children’s desires to confess some terrible action or unspeakable thought, and mostly, if she was patient and gave them the space, they finally told her what they wanted to say.
But Savannah sat, one hand wrapped tightly around the key on the chain at her neck and watched the sky darken until the bats vanished into the inky blackness, and when she finally opened her mouth all she said was, ‘I think I’ll make a tomato and basil frittata for our dinner.’
A part of Joy was relieved. Savannah wasn’t her child. She didn’t want to know her secrets. She didn’t need to know.
When the twenty-one days were up and they said goodbye to their tiny house in the wilderness, Savannah drove them back to Sydney.
‘What are you going to do now?’ asked Joy.
‘I might call my brother,’ said Savannah. ‘Tell him I did his “challenge”， for what it’s worth, and then I don’t know what I’ll do. Make another new life somewhere? What about you?’
‘Oh,’ said Joy, ‘I guess I’ll just go home.’
For the first time she understood what a privilege it was to be able to say that.
*
‘Who cooked for you while I was gone?’ Joy asked Stan once, when they were eating dinner.
‘Caro sent over a horrible chewy lamb casserole. Brooke brought around some meals,’ said Stan. ‘But I told her I could cook for myself. Not sure where this “Stan can’t boil an egg” thing came from. I taught you to boil an egg.’
‘You did not,’ said Joy.
‘I did so,’ said Stan.
The memory floated to the surface of her mind, perfectly preserved, like an ancient artefact.
He did in fact teach her how to boil the perfect soft-boiled egg, and that was when he told her that as a kid he’d often had to cook for himself after his father left and his mother was ‘napping’， and Joy had been overcome with a girlish, sensual desire to feed her man, to nurture him like a real woman would, to mother him the way he hadn’t been mothered, and she’d kept him out of the kitchen, shoo-ed him away until he stayed away, and as the years went by, cooking stopped feeling sensual and womanly and loving and became drudgery.
‘Maybe we could take turns with the cooking,’ she said. ‘During lockdown.’
‘Sure,’ said Stan.
‘Careful what you wish for,’ warned Debbie Christos, who still had bad memories of the year Dennis decided to become a Cordon Bleu chef and spent hours preparing distressing fiddly French dishes often involving innocent ducklings.
Stan wasn’t interested in ducklings, thank goodness, but it turned out he could cook a perfectly adequate roast dinner.
When he put the plate down in front of her, he’d set up his new phone to play ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet’ from 1974, when they were entirely different people, and also exactly the same.
‘Haven’t I?’ asked Joy.
‘Nope,’ said Stan.
*
Sometimes, at two am, it was always two am for some reason, Joy would sit bolt upright in bed because a kind of horror had seeped into her dreams and she would find herself thinking about Stan in handcuffs, and the lines of coffins on the TV news, and Polly Perkins, who had not gone on to live happily ever after in New Zealand as Joy had always believed, but whose body had been discovered while Joy was away, and people had briefly thought it might have been Joy’s body, and she would find herself thinking about all the women who assumed their lives were just like hers, far too ordinary to end in newsworthy violence and yet they had, and all the ordinary people, just like her and Stan, who had been planning ‘active retirements’ and whose lives were now ending cruelly, abruptly and far too soon.