The papers were final on a Wednesday. I didn't feel free. I felt like a house after the furniture has been carried out: echo, dust, the outline of where a sofa was. I am Claire. I am forty-two. Divorced, which is a word that sounds like a door and behaves like a corridor. I had not been touched in the last year of the marriage except by accident, in kitchens. I had started to wonder if curiosity was a thing I had used up in my thirties.

His name was David. Forty-four. I met him at a community studio in Adelaide where I had signed up to learn to throw a bowl, because a bowl is a shape you can fail at in public and take home anyway. He was bad at bowls and good at sitting with the failure. On the third week he walked me to my car and didn't kiss me. He…