Yvonne’s pick
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First thing she’d do was remove the for sale sign. She kicked aside the block of wood that served as a lock for the ranch slider and heaved it open. It was interrupting her view of the water. Well, the mudflats. This far up the harbour, the tide didn’t so much roll in and out as seep up and drain away. She inhaled. Brine and decay and something dead under the deck. Her bubble for one.
A failed relationship. Why was it that any relationship that didn’t end in death had failed? Years from now, would they catch up for a drink and wonder why they were ever together or why they’d ever broken up?
A car engine. Weird. She tracked the sound as it left the tarseal and grumbled on to the stones. She knew the second it would appear — and there it was. A nondescript grey import.
Sunlight winked off its windscreen as it pulled up on the lawn. A man got out. Not a man. Him. His grey T-shirt, stretched at one hem. His jeans with the barbed-wire rip. She knew just how he’d smell. Lived-in, like a favourite hoodie that rarely got dirty or sweaty enough to warrant being washed.
“Ah,” he said, slinging an arm over the car door. “I thought you were living in town now.”
“The thought of being locked down with my flatmates …” To be fair, they weren’t so bad. She just hated having flatmates. She hated having to have flatmates. “I thought you were in Melbourne.”
“I was. Am. But I don’t have a place to live yet and we’re working remotely, so ... ” He tapped the car roof. “I can’t go to Dad’s, can I? Besides, this is where I said I’d go. ‘Home.’ Apparently the cops check.” “All the way out here?”
He shrugged.
She leaned against the door frame. Home. She’d noted his emphasis. And, yeah, this was no longer their place in the world. Their time together had passed. But was it really a failure? Or ... a finite success.
“First thing you can do is remove the for sale sign.”
Bronwyn Sell’s Lovestruck (Harpercollins, is available now as an ebook $5).