Free Too Close to Home by Georgia Blain

first step in the several that led to them being together as they are now.
    She closes her scrapbook; the review she had been searching for isn’t there. Staying just as she is, legs now outstretched on the floor in front of her, she feels as though she has been bathing in the richness of how she once loved, the dark romance of it, a state that had to give way and one that she wouldn’t want to return to, but there is sadness in remembering, because there’s a stillness between them now. The newness of their life in this house has faded, and they have settled into a routine weighed down by a dissatisfaction that hovers, a cloud she wants to burst. Perhaps she just needs to take his head between her hands and tell him how much she loves him? She looks out to the garden. Even if she felt that would help, she knows her best intentions are always waylaid by the demands of domestic life.
    Later, as she lies on the bed with Ella reading her a story, she stops as she often does, to kiss the softness of her skin.
    She can hear Matt out in the hall, searching for his keys, and then he opens the door quietly, showing them just his face as he tells them that he is heading up the road.
    â€˜To have a drink with Shane. Won’t be long.’
    â€˜Don’t get drunk,’ she says, unable to hide her disappointment. She’d wanted an evening together.
    Ella squirms out of Freya’s hold, attempting to climb out of bed hands first, feet second. ‘I’m coming,’ she says, her entire body collapsing onto the floor.
    Freya grasps her daughter’s ankles and pulls her back under the covers.
    â€˜Why can’t I go?’ she asks. ‘I could sleep up there.’
    It’s late, Freya explains, and time for bed. They lie together, sheet pulled over their heads as Freya answersthe questions Ella always has before sleep. Lately they’ve all focused on a particular potential accident, the possibility of falling into the gap between a train and a station platform. It worries Ella and she wants reassurance that this will not happen to her.
    â€˜Never,’ Freya says.
    â€˜But has it ever happened to a kid?’
    Freya says she doesn’t know for certain.
    â€˜Can you ask Google?’
    â€˜I suppose so,’ Freya tells her. ‘But in any event it’s not going to happen to you.’
    â€˜Why not?’
    â€˜Because we’ll make sure it doesn’t.’
    The questions can go on forever; the trick is in knowing when to draw the line, finding that moment when it is no longer a matter of Ella genuinely wanting answers but actually a ploy to stay up that little bit later.
    Freya kisses Ella on the nose and tells her it’s time for sleep.
    She pours herself a glass of wine and calls Clara to complain that she is bored and lonely. ‘Is this what happens to married women in the suburbs?’ she asks.
    â€˜Seems so.’ Clara is also alone. Julia is out playing tennis. ‘I’d come over,’ Clara says, ‘but you live so far away now.’
    Freya sighs. ‘I probably need to make some new friends. Ones that live in the neighbourhood. Not that I would forget you.’
    At ten o’clock Matt still isn’t home. He will be sitting with Shane, drinking beer, passing joints back and forth, remembering, their voices slow and slurred. She wonders whether the kids will still be up.
    â€˜They drag a mattress into the lounge room and all sleep together,’ Matt once told her. ‘When it’s really hot they take it out to the garden.’ He’d looked around their place. ‘Strange,’ he said, ‘how middle class, how straight, you get.’
    â€˜That’s what we are.’ Although her tone was light, the unease between them had slipped into her veins, once again.
    She sits on the computer and trawls through eBay, searching for nothing in particular. A rug for the bedroom, a Danish dining room table that looks