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A week later, she met Keith at a party Melanie had taken her to. He was in computers, was only slightly taller than she was, and had a relaxed, easy laugh. On their first date, he took her to a romantic comedy and she caught him quickly wiping his eyes when the movie ended. He was kind and sensitive, and always pleasant to be with. He was polite to her mother and got along with her brother, and before Anna knew it, she was Anna-and-Keith, not just Anna.

Getting married was the next step, and only in moments of stress did she question if she had simply been borne along by the tide of her relationship or had been actively steering her way forward.

‘Are you going to interview Keith as well, Detective Anderson?' she says. She wants to call him Walt but it would feel strange to do so.

‘We will speak to him but today we're primarily concerned with you and Caroline. You were the only two there at the time.'

‘I don't call her Caroline. It's odd to hear you say her full name. I call her Caro.'

‘How long have you known each other?'

‘It feels like forever, but it's only eleven years—well, nearly twelve now. We met when the girls were a year old. They were both so little then, it was hard to imagine them ever sleeping through the night or feeding themselves. It was hard to imagine that they'd ever be . . . real people,
I suppose, but it happened. They changed and they grew; well, I suppose Lex changed more than Maya did.'

Anna places the two girls side by side in her mind and compares, for the thousandth time, their differences. Lex, at eleven, is tall and has the slightly gangly look of a child who's been stretched. Her arms are a little too long and her legs seem sticklike, but her burnished hair and brown eyes make her beautiful, and Anna knows that, one day, she will turn heads as she walks by. Maya was taller than Anna and already in large adult sizes. Even on her special diet, she managed to get bigger and bigger. Food—at least, the food she liked—was everything to Maya, and when she was eating, she was happy and quiet.

‘It's her one pleasure,' Anna always thought, ‘why deny her?' By the time Anna realised that thought was a mistake, it was too late to change Maya's eating habits. She could go through two packets of rice crackers in ten minutes. She hated all fruit except bananas and could eat three at a time. She loved peanut butter on gluten-free toast and could eat six slices at breakfast.

‘You need to take control of her diet,' the paediatrician told Anna the last time she had a check-up. ‘I can't control her,' Anna wanted to say but instead had nodded like she understood. The paediatrician was a lovely man, well into his sixties and looking forward to retirement. Visiting him mostly made Anna feel like she was talking to her late grandfather and he was rarely stern with her. She didn't really need to see him, because Maya had so many other
doctors taking care of her, but she liked him. He listened more than he talked.

She had kept nodding, even though what she had wanted to do was tell him about what had happened when she'd locked the pantry door so Maya couldn't get to the food inside. Maya had tugged at the lock for a few minutes while Anna tried to pull her away, and then had turned around and pushed Anna hard, slamming her into the kitchen island, causing her to drop to the floor. Anna had heard herself whimpering because of the pain that had surged through her back. Maya had walked out of the kitchen and retuned with her iPad. She had touched the button for ‘open' again and again, until Anna had scrambled to her feet and unlocked the pantry door.

‘I'll try,' Anna had told the paediatrician.

‘Maya and Lex were very different,' she says to Detective Anderson, and thinks now it's peculiar to acknowledge that, while she has imagined her friend's daughter growing up, she never imagined her own child in adult form.

‘It's strange to think that Caro woke up to see her child this morning and I didn't wake up to see mine,' she says. ‘I hate to sound like Keith, but it's all so bizarre that I have to wonder how it is possible for something like this to happen.' Anna covers her mouth with her hand. She has said very little in the last few weeks except ‘thank you'. ‘Thank you for coming, thank you for the card, thank you for the casserole, thank you for the cake, thank you for your tears, thank you for knowing that my daughter is . . . gone
and my heart is broken. Thank you.' Now the words seem to be pouring from her, as if being shut in this room with this man who is a stranger has somehow freed her tongue.

‘I don't . . . I don't . . .' says Detective Anderson.

Anna can see he has no idea what to say to her. Most people feel useless in the face of someone's grief. They utter phrases they've heard and say stupid things but they don't mean to offend. It's because they have no idea what to say. In moments of anger, Anna directs her fury at people who've told her that Maya is in a better place or that everything happens for the best; but when she is calm and quiet, she understands that it is difficult to be comfortable with silence. Everyone feels they have to say something, say anything. Human beings are not programmed to just be, and while the idea of someone holding her hand without saying anything is appealing, she knows that it's unlikely to happen.

She imagines the police are given manuals on dealing with grief-stricken people, but whatever the manual says is probably useless in the face of raw emotion. She wonders if this detective joined the police force for action and excitement but now finds himself dealing with very different situations. She feels sorry for him and then wants to laugh at herself.
You feel sorry for him?

He opens and closes his mouth a few times as he looks at her, and she can feel him sifting through a list of phrases he must have in his head. Finally, he simply opens his arms wide, as if to tell her, ‘I don't know what to say,' and she
forgives him for that because she appreciates his silence more than she would words. She has no idea what to say either—not even to herself.

‘It was so quick,' says Anna. ‘One minute she was fine, and the next, she was lying in the road and I was screaming. I only realised the ambulance had been called when the paramedics shoved me out of the way so they could get to her. Time slows down, you know, just like it does in the movies. Seconds seem to take hours, and sound doesn't get through. All I could hear was my heart beating, and then, suddenly, Keith was there and he was shouting, and Caro was pulling me away, and then we were in the car, following the ambulance. I don't remember getting into the car, but I remember the flashing lights of the ambulance. I thought,' Anna leans forward and covers her eyes with her hands, ‘I thought—where is that ambulance going?'

‘It's okay, Anna; it's okay,' says Detective Anderson, and Anna takes another tissue from the box Detective Moreno—Cynthia—has just placed in front of her.

‘Are you sure you want to do this today? It really doesn't have to happen now. We can wait, we really can,' he says.

‘No, I don't want to wait. I want this done.' It is about the only thing she is sure of. She wants this over with, so that she can lie on her bed and close her eyes for a whole day; for a whole week, or month, or forever. She had had no idea how much time grief takes up, how many things there are to do, how many forms there are to sign and conversations to have. ‘We have a beautiful pink coffin that we
can use, if you'd like,' the woman from the funeral home had said. Anna had looked at her, wondering if the woman was mad, wondering if she was mad. It didn't matter. None of it mattered. Her mother organised the food to be eaten after the funeral. ‘Lots of people will come,' she said, and Anna nodded like she understood what she was saying, but what was she saying—
who on earth could eat?

After today she doesn't want to have to talk ever again about what happened two weeks ago. She just wants it done. She sits up straight in her chair and takes a sip of tea. It is scalding, just the way she likes it, and the burn in her mouth centres her. She nods at Walt—she will call him Walt now that she has said so many other things to him—letting him know she is ready to go on.

‘All right then; let's go back to when you and Mrs Harman met. Where did you meet?' he says, no doubt hoping that an innocuous memory will allow Anna time to get herself under control. She has a feeling that the hard questions will come soon but, right now, Walt doesn't seem to want to push her. He has no idea, after all, of how much she can take. It feels like they are playing a strange game, she and her two detectives, and that she needs to be careful what moves she makes.

‘We met at the clinic. We'd brought the girls in for their twelve-month check-ups on the same day. I was sitting in the waiting room, flicking through one of those parenting magazines—you know, the ones filled with articles about how you should only feed your child organic food?' Anna shakes her head. ‘Those stupid, stupid, articles. Anyway,
I wasn't really reading, I was just looking at the pictures of all the perfect mothers with their perfect babies, and she just started talking to me. She was so . . . I don't know what you would call her . . . so honest, I guess.'

‘Honest?

‘Yes. I was just sitting there in the waiting room, watching Maya. She was in her pram, playing this little portable DVD player. She was watching a video of a hand putting shapes into one of those shape-sorters. Do you know what that is? Do either of you have kids?'

‘I know, Anna,' says Cynthia, and Anna turns to look at her. She has freckles across her perfect little nose, making her look impossibly young to have a child.

‘You don't look old enough to have children,' Anna says, and is about to apologise again but bites her lip a little instead. She wishes that she looked like someone who had not been worn down, worn out, worn through, by having a child.

‘I have two boys,' Cynthia says and a smile makes its way across her face. Anna recognises that smile; she's seen it on so many mothers. She knows that she had one of those smiles when Maya was a few days old. She knows that she walked around with that same smile for a few weeks after Maya was born—at least, until things got difficult. She can remember wanting to touch every person she saw and say, ‘Did you know about this? Did you know that you can love another human being this much?' Cynthia's smile speaks of a secret, deep love, of exclusive membership to the greatest club in the world.

I will never have that smile again
, Anna thinks but it doesn't make her feel sad. The love that smile signified nearly destroyed her. In her case, it had been a temporary feeling, an infatuation that was blown away by the reality.

‘I think we must have about five different shape-sorters around the house,' says Cynthia. ‘You must have seen one, Walt, they're a standard toy for any kid.'

Anna thinks about the relationship between the two detectives. They are not married and only one of them has children. She assumes she must have been wrong about them but still senses something between them. An illicit affair, perhaps?

‘Yeah, of course I have,' says Walt. ‘I think I gave my niece one for her first birthday.' Anna catches a lightning-quick look between Walt and Cynthia, and understands that Walt has seen the shape-sorters at Cynthia's house. She doesn't know if she can see this because the two of them are quite transparent or because she is looking for it. She has spent the last eleven years looking down at Maya and has only looked up in the last two weeks, to find her senses heightened as though she'd just learned to see and hear again. Well, that's what Maya was doing,' says Anna, forcing herself to concentrate. ‘She liked to watch the video over and over again. She even knew how to press the rewind and play buttons to get it to go again. It only lasted about a minute. I think she liked that the same thing always happened. She is . . . she was . . . a big fan of routine. The triangle shape went into the triangle hole,
and the same thing with the square and the rectangle. When she rewound it, the same thing happened but backwards. She liked things she could predict, she liked things to be the same. She would just sit and watch it over and over and over again.'

‘At twelve months. That's pretty advanced,' says Cynthia, and Anna swallows to stifle a laugh she can feel building up inside her. Her reactions are all inappropriate but there is nothing she can do about it.

‘Yes, that's what Caro said,' she replies. ‘She sat down in the chair next to me and put Lex—Alexa—on the floor and just stared at Maya.'

‘And you two started talking?'

‘Not right away. For a few minutes, she watched my child and I watched hers. She'd put Lex on the floor, and Lex had crawled over to one of the chairs in the waiting room and pulled herself up to stand, and then she cruised around the room, holding onto whatever she could to keep herself up and walking. Every time someone else walked through the clinic door, she turned to look who was there. She smiled when another mother put her child on the floor next to her. She pointed at a picture and looked at Caro, and tried to say something. She was very . . . very different to Maya.' Anna stops talking. It was so obvious to her, watching Lex, that what Maya was doing was not normal. Maya never lifted her eyes from the screen. She didn't care where she was or who was there; all that mattered was the screen, and the shapes going in and out of the shape-sorter. It was
obvious to Anna when she watched any child the same age as Maya that her daughter was different.

By the time Maya was twelve months old, Anna had read and re-read at least five books that detailed milestones her child should have reached, searching for an answer as to why Maya was doing things so late or not at all.

‘All children are different,' her paediatrician told her. Anna had felt comforted by his age, by his lack of concern. ‘He must have seen hundreds and hundreds of babies in his time,' she had thought.