‘WHERE are we?’

Erin planned to wake the minute they woke, but she must have been too exhausted for her normal House Mother instincts to work. She’d propped open both bathroom doors so the twins could see her as soon as they opened their eyes, and now they landed on her bed in a tangle of legs and arms and astonishment.

‘Did the house really burn down? Did we really ride in a police car?’

That was easy.

‘It did and you did and you’re now at Mr McKay’s farm,’ she said, hugging them to her and hauling them in to lie under the covers. She was wearing an oversized T-shirt, and in their oddly assorted pyjamas they looked just as disreputable as she did. They were like something out of a charity bazaar, she thought and grinned to herself and hugged harder. She didn’t mind. They were safe.

‘The policeman won’t arrest us?’ It was Henry, ever the anxious one.

‘Now why would he arrest you?’

‘Because we made a bomb.’

‘But you’ve promised faithfully never to make another one,’ she said.

‘Mmm.’

She fixed Henry with a look. ‘You did promise.’

‘Yeah.’ He gave her a feeble smile. ‘Okay. We did.’

‘Then I think we might persuade him not to arrest you-this time.’

Apparently this was satisfactory. They snuggled down beside her and then snuggled some more.

But then William asked what was apparently super important in both their minds.

‘Erin, where’s Tigger?’

Oh dear. Erin thought back to the last she’d seen of the house. There seemed not one snowball’s chance in a bushfire that anything could have been saved. There was nothing to do but tell them the truth.

‘Guys, I’m afraid Tigger was burned.’

That silenced them completely. They lay, taking in the enormity of it, and then Henry sniffed.

One sniff was all he allowed himself, but Erin’s heart wrenched. Tigger had been given to the boys by one of their first foster families-a sort of sop-to-conscience-at-taking-them-back-to-the-orphanage gift-and they’d been so young they’d mixed him up with leaving their mother and their bothers and sisters. Tigger had become their only constant, a toy never fought over, never discussed, but simply there.