A SMALL PRINTED card offered extra towels, if they should need them. They hadn’t been provided in the first instance, Leah read, because the guesthouse was eco-friendly. The card was cream coloured, expensive and embossed with an unfamiliar font. Leah rubbed the corner between thumb and forefinger, tilting her head to one side. Normally, she could pick card stock with her eyes closed. Oh well: she propped it back on the marble bathroom vanity, angled just so. In the mirror she caught a glimpse of her wrist tattoo, old and shabby, the black heart more blue smudge these days. She rotated her forearm back and forth, watching the tattoo appear and disappear in the mirror, like it belonged to someone else, someone a long way from here.

Leah was in the Barossa Valley, and this was the poshest guesthouse she’d ever seen. The only other time she was somewhere nearly as posh was their wedding night last year. They were in the city then, at the Hilton. She remembered Patrick telling her that hotels say ‘eco-friendly’ because it’s trendy, when really they can’t be bothered washing your extra towels. He was standing in a pair of green satin boxers when he said that. She remembered watching his clean, pale body as she folded the second-hand wedding dress and laid it in the pearly cardboard box provided by the hotel. How sure Patrick had seemed then, how his eyes shone with certainty – about the towels, about all sorts of things.