It’s not easy to disappear. Hard enough for one person let alone a mother and three children, but Paige believed she’d pulled it off. Sun streamed in through the kitchen window, warming the canary-yellow benchtops where she was slicing fruit for the kids’ after-school snack. She lifted her gaze to the row of brightly coloured geraniums lining the fence beyond the window and allowed herself a smile.

They’d been in the little town of Badara in rural South Australia for six weeks and no one had come looking for them, and there’d been no unexpected knocks on her door or weird deliveries. She had a new phone and a new number that, apart from the children’s schools, only her best friend Niesha had, plus she’d given it to her parents but they rarely made contact, and Levi’s other grandparents who lived in New Zealand.

It had been hard not to stand out when they’d first arrived. Badara was a town of around three hundred people if you also counted those living on nearby farms.

Anyone new was immediately under scrutiny. Naturally the locals had shown interest in the newcomers. Paige knew how to be polite without giving too much away and so far she’d managed to keep people at arm’s length.

The house had been a surprising windfall. She’d had no idea where to hide and Google had come to her aid. Her frantic search for a rental that was both cheap and far from Melton, Victoria, had turned up this fabulous old house, with its large rooms and high ceilings. It came partly furnished, and the best part was the ridiculously cheap rent. After driving for three days, with road-side campouts, she’d been exhausted and the kids cranky and she’d been terrified that she might have dragged them all this way to a non-existent house. In the dull light of that grey afternoon it had looked a bit worse for wear and the garden was part overgrown and part dead, but the house had been true to the photos and her distant landlord’s promise of being weatherproof and liveable.

“Mummy, I’m hungry.”

Levi’s plaintive voice and big imploring brown eyes brought her back to the present.

“Have some apple.” She handed him a quarter of the fruit she’d been doing her best to cut the bad bits out of. That was the only thing that hadn’t changed – the difficulty she had trying to feed her kids. She’d used her meagre savings to move them, and buy the new phone and some extra bits of furniture. It hadn’t left a lot to build up her staples…

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