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was kind of different. They’d managed to overlook their differences when it seemed as if their best friends weren’t going to make it. They’d engineered a rendezvous at the pub and Ry and Julia had been together ever since.
    Whatever potential there was for anything between her and Dan had been snuffed out months ago in a car wreck on a dark road just outside of Middle Point.
    Lizzie turned the corner into her street and saw Harri in the distance. Her neighbour’s bright orange shirt was hard to miss and she threw Lizzie a spirited wave, beckoning her to come over. Harri watered her front garden at sunset every night, totally in line with water restrictions and in solidarity with the life-giving River Murray.
    ‘G’day Lizzie! How are you, doll? Fancy a cuppa?’ Harri leaned down to yank off her garden tap, her loose grey bun drooping to one side as she bent over. ‘You’re a bit late tonight. What’s up at the watering hole?’
    Lizzie sighed. ‘Nothing, I just got a little held up.’ She tried to avoid her friend’s eyes.
    ‘Something tells me you’re bullshitting, Lizzie. But I’m sure you’ll spill the beans in your own good time.’ Harriet Byrne had been a trailblazer in her younger years and for two decades had represented the local area in State Parliament. Now in her seventies, she’d left politics behind but still had a blindingly good nose for intrigue.
    That’s why Lizzie changed the subject so fast. ‘How’s your hip holding up today?’
    ‘Oh, it’s a bugger. You think the warmer weather would help but no, it hurts like a bastard.’ Harri plonked a hand on the hip in question for added emphasis. ‘The doctor keeps telling me I should get a new one.’
    Lizzie laughed out loud. ‘Don’t tell me, you’re not taking any advice from that quack, right?’
    ‘Doctors,’ Harri winked. ‘You know me too well, doll. What do you think about ditching that cuppa and opening a bottle instead?’
    Lizzie looped her arm around Harri’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze. ‘You had me at g’day, Harri.’

CHAPTER
5
    The early morning sun was already shining so bright that the lapping waves on the sand shimmered like liquid mercury, hot and silver in the distance. With her red bodyboard nestled under the crook of her right arm, Lizzie took slow steps into the waves, cool on her ankles and calves, the cover of her knee-length wetsuit insulating the rest of her from the freshness of the water. Being in the ocean calmed her. The unyielding pull of the waves, the mysterious interaction of the moon and gravity that created the tides, the pounding sound in her ears. It was all heaven to Lizzie. For some people it was classical music. For her, the rhythm of the deep was always enough.
    Lizzie breathed in, let the sea air fill her lungs. Above her, the sky was almost cloudless, a brilliant early summer blue with only a few scattered streaks of white marking the eastern sky. A pair of seagulls flew low over the water and Lizzie watched in amusement as one landed to bob on the water right near her. The gull cocked its head in her direction, flapped its wings and took off, soaring away with the southerlies.
    Just like the gulls, Lizzie felt a part of this place, had grown up looking at this ocean most every day of her life. The Southern Ocean could be unforgiving, as the historic wrecks of ships along parts of the rocky coast could attest, but she loved the wildness of it, the knowledge that there was nothing between her and the Antarctic but a few thousands miles of ocean.
    It was her favourite place, her saving grace, her anchor. She’d needed to get out there in the waves, to calm her growing sense of dislocation. Since Dan’s accident, normal life in Middle Point had veered off course, like a stone from a crooked slingshot, in a direction no one had prepared for or planned. And since then, nothing had come together in exactly the same order. Julia and Ry were still on tenterhooks around Dan and their