Chapter 23: When It Matters

Five weeks later, Abel sent me a photograph of a roof.

It had no tiles yet, only a frame of new timber against a blue sky.

Under it he had typed, *Come and see before the rain does.*

I took the supply boat out of Townsville on a Thursday, with Junie in the carrier and my mother's blessing.

She was fifteen weeks old and wanted to grab the sea.

Abel waited on the jetty with a new cane and a grin.

"Knee's done," he said. "They put a bit of titanium in. I'll set off airport alarms till I die."

"You look younger."

"I look like I finally slept in a bed." He took my bag. "Come on. Mind the beams."

The island had changed.

The garden was cleared and the palms were cut back to stumps.

The stone house stood on the hill with a new steel frame over its old bones, and a ladder leaned on every wall.

There was a cistern, bright and new, and the helipad had been scraped bare.

Rhys wasn't there.

"Gone to the mainland for the last of the ridge beams," Abel said. "He'll be back this afternoon."

"I didn't tell him I was coming."

"I know. He'd have shaved." Abel hesitated. "Come and look at the cellar."

I followed him up the path.

The oak door had been rehung.

Above it, set into the stone lintel, ran a row of letters cut deep and square.

Eleven names.

*Daniel Marsh* was the eighth.

I put my fingers in the cut of my brother's name, and felt the clean edge of the chisel.

"He did it himself," Abel said quietly. "Six nights."

He rubbed his beard.

"I told him a mason in Bowen would do it for nothing. He said no."

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