Elise had been waiting at the front door when the delivery van pulled up. Its headlights panned across the house as it swung into the driveway, casting tiny specks of light around the empty entrance hall. Elise wondered if the van’s occupants could see her, ghost-like, through the glass pane.

Two men climbed out of the van. They made their way along the brick path, past the row of agapanthus standing like wild-haired guards at its edges. Elise felt a rush of anticipation then, for the thought of everything that would be in those boxes in the back of the van: all the furniture from her and Joel’s apartment, their wedding gifts, plates and towels and vases, objects to be worn in during their lives ahead in Sydney. She wondered if her sister, Lou, and their mother had looked at the gifts before they packed them – knowing Sylvia, she would have been superstitious about it.

The men set the first lot of boxes down in the living room, and the taller man told her that they had driven all night from Melbourne.