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When had she become this horrid, bitter woman?

Forty minutes after Josh had pulled up outside her apartment block, she was clicking on the indicator of her battered little car and parking beside the sweep of lawn at the front of Connolly House. A young nurse sporting a retro hairdo and concerned eyes walked her through corridors that smelled of lemon cleaner and tea trolleys and into the quiet hum of a room set up like a hospital ward.

Jill lay there, still.

Frail as a bird—wasn’t that the phrase?—she hadn’t realised the truth of the saying until this moment. Her aunt’s thin frame lay beneath a pale mustard waffle-weave blanket, and the ridges that were Jill, the jut of hip bones and chest and thin feet, barely showed.

Where had her brave, ferocious, fun aunt gone?

A round-cheeked woman, nearly as wide as she was tall, stood by the end of the bed tapping figures into some sort of digital chart.

‘Dr Brown?’ said the nurse. ‘This is Jill’s niece, Vera.’

Vera stepped up to the bed and took one of her aunt’s thin hands in hers. A gauze bandage covered her aunt’s temple, but aside from that she looked as though she had fallen asleep, although—

Her eyes lingered on the set of Jill’s mouth: one corner drooped slightly, as though tugged down to her chin by some wry thought. Not asleep but unconscious.

‘Your aunt’s had a stroke, Vera.’

She nodded, as though she had some idea what that meant, when she had no idea. Not about this, not about anything. She asked the question bubbling at the top of her thoughts. ‘Is she dying?’

Dr Brown was blunt. ‘Not this minute. But Vera, this is a hospice. Your aunt has a complicated array of medical conditions, and she’s here because her doctors back in the city have determined medical intervention will not save her.’

‘I know. It’s just … I’m not ready.’

She felt a plump hand pat her on the shoulder. ‘Family is never ready. But maybe your aunt is. Does she look upset to you? Or does she look peaceful?’

Vera raised her eyebrows at the doctor, then turned to look at her aunt again. Jilldidlook peaceful. Pink bloomed in her cheeks, her grey hair was smooth and brushed. Other than the odd lilt to the corner of her mouth, her aunt could have been caught napping under a wattle tree on a lazy summer afternoon.

‘I’m going to sit with her a while. Just in case.’

‘You do that.’ Dr Brown smiled and slipped the digital chart back into its dock. ‘I’ll be doing rounds again in a few hours. The nurses will call me before if they need to. And Vera?’

She looked up.

‘Say your goodbyes. Let Jill hear them now, while she’s still with us, so she can take your words with her when she goes.’

Vera nodded, but on the inside her thoughts were rebelling. Jill couldn’t gonow, not when she was finally safe at Connolly House. The café profits were steady, the nursing care was all that she’d hoped for and more. Jillhadto live, so Vera could make up for sending her aunt to that terrible place near the city.

Jill had to live, so Vera wouldn’t be alone.

When the nurses finally persuaded her to head home and rest, hours had passed. A yowl greeted her as she opened the door of her apartment. For an old pregnant cat, who supposedly supported herself on an impoverished diet of dumpster scraps, she had a healthy set of lungs.

Kev’s favourite saying floated through her head.Hold your horses, love.

She’d have said it to the cat if she wasn’t so tired.

She turned the handle on the laundry door and an irritated eight-kilo lump of fur stalked past her into the living room.

‘And hello to you, too,’ said Vera.

She flicked the switch on the wall so white light flooded the narrow space, and braced herself for a scene from a horror movie: inch-deep gouges in the cupboard fronts, pillow-sized clumps of moulted fur, toxic waste where the kitty litter tray had been.

Hmm. The laundry was pristine. The bowl of water was perhaps an inch lower than it had been when she had left this morning, but other than that … okay. Perhaps that MISSINGYOURCAT?sign she’d been thinking about putting up at the shop could wait another day or two.

A tuna sandwich. She could share it with the cat. A glass of wine, which there was no way she was sharing. And then maybe a long, long sit in the armchair by the window where she could think of nothing at all for a while.

Not her aunt’s pale face propped amid hospital pillows.