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all manner of synthetic fabrics were forever in fashion. Mak spotted men’s shirts in one corner and a rockabilly-style jacket hanging on the closet doorhandle. There was a pair of men’s pointy black shoes next to the bed. It looked like Drayson had been spending a bit of time at the apartment.
    She stepped back into the hall and pushed the opposite door open. It was a bathroom of plain white tile, small enough that Mak guessed it would be possible to shower, use the toilet and brush one’s teeth in the sink simultaneously.
    Two weeks. Well, you’d better make yourself at home.
    She returned to the bedroom, and looked the room up and down before piling Drayson’s things in one corner and hers in another. There was no hanging space left in the closet, but Mak had brought only two small panniers of clothing, which amounted to little more than some T-shirts, jeans, a suit jacketand skirt, two LBDs—little black dresses—and her briefcase. She hung her nicer things carefully from the window fastener before peeling off her leathers with a sense of relief, and heading for the shower cubicle.
    Mak was eager to scrub off the seven months and 288 kilometres.
    You did it. You aren’t going back.
    An hour later, Mak found herself frowning in Loulou’s living room, a cooling cup of tea in her hand. A few feet away, her bike leathers were depressingly sprawled over a plastic chair, in the form of a deflated man. She could hear echoing footsteps in rooms and hallways on floors above. A dog barked outside. Her mobile phone was ringing on the coffee table.
    She ignored it.
    How many moves in the past five years? Four? Five? How many more in the next five years? she wondered.
    She was getting tired of her life being perpetually uprooted. This time she had packed her things in a flustered rush once she’d made the final decision to leave. She’d tried to get everything done before there was a confrontation with her lover upon his return from overseas. She didn’t want a fight. She didn’t want any more fighting.
    Beep.
    Beep.
    Beep.
    Mak listened to her phone’s persistent cricket-like cry with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. It might have been her Sydney friend Karen Mahoney, a cop, checking in on her recent relocation. But it might be her ex-lover, Detective Senior Sergeant Andrew Flynn, who had just touched down in Australia after his lateststint at the Quantico FBI Academy. Andy was the man she had temporarily moved to Canberra to be with and precisely the one person she didn’t want a call from.
    No more fighting.
    It rang and rang, and when finally she capitulated, it had rung out. With strained breath, Mak flipped the phone open to check, and at the sight of the name on the display, a little knot formed in her stomach.
    Andy.
    There would be no comfort there. Not now and never again. Mak closed her mobile phone, put it back gently on the coffee table and tried not to look at it. She tried not to imagine what she would say if she called him back. She tried not to imagine him— tall, dark-haired and masculine—arriving at the door and kissing her deeply.
    Fuck.
    He was back after a three-week trip, and part of her missed him. She had known it wouldn’t be easy. Not at first. This was something she had to do, and anything worth doing was hard, wasn’t it?
    Beep.
    Beep.
    Beep.
    Oh, for godsake, Andy! Leave me be!
    Exasperated, Mak picked up her mobile phone and again checked the caller ID. To her surprise, it was an unlisted number. She sat cross-legged on the furry couch and gathered herself before answering, suspicious that her former lover might be calling from another number so she would answer him, and have to listen to his limp explanations.
    ‘Yes?’ Her voice was tentative.
    ‘Mak Vanderwall?’ came a familiar drawl. Only her friends knew her as ‘Mak’. It was not Loulou. It didn’t sound like Karen.
    Mak paused, unable to exactly place the voice. Her eyes went to the windowsill, where a wind-up toy hula