It wasn't entirely by accident that Sacha found herself gazing through the window of a travel agent the next day. The idea of a holiday had been on her mind since talking to Kate the night before. She felt like getting out of the house anyway, it was the weekend and she felt like she should give Hannah and Shelly some space because they'd had a minor argument the night before and Sacha felt like the last thing they'd need was a third wheel. So here she was at the local shopping strip, taking a book to a café to sit down and have a coffee just for a change, and she knew there was a travel agent on this strip, so while she was here she might as well . . .

She had just over three-thousand dollars saved up in her bank account. Once upon a time, years ago when she first arrived in Melbourne, she'd had a lot more than that, but it'd all been spent: firstly because she was new to the city, so she didn't know how much things ought to cost and how much cheaper she could get them for; secondly because she didn't know anyone, and she kind of liked it that way, so she'd moved into that flat by herself which wasn't the cheapest way of doing things; thirdly because it'd taken her so long to find a job.

She couldn't remember if she'd come to this shopping strip in those first months of living in Melbourne: she'd been looking at the city with different eyes back then. All she saw now were the same old shops and cafés and restaurants she expected to see, that she'd seen hundreds of times before since moving in with Hannah and had started basing herself around Lygon Street (not the fashionable end) and Sydney Road instead of Brunswick Street.

It'd been all about Brunswick Street in those early days. The flat in Fitzroy had been unexpected: what chance finding a place in one of the only parts of Melbourne she'd heard of before? That she hadn't particularly liked the flat hadn't mattered at the time any more than the fact that she didn't particularly like her job either: both were a necessity, and she'd settled for them for purely functional reasons. Happiness could come later.

Anyway that flat was in the past. The job was still the same, but it was a means to an end. The end wasn't defined: Sacha had an image in her mind of her bank balance reading ten-thousand dollars. If she could get that, she felt she could do anything with it. It struck her as faintly absurd that she could be almost thirty and such a sum of money still seemed impossibly, glamorously large to her. Ten, fifteen years ago someone her age would've been looking at buying a house, and now here she was looking at holidays: one-thousand nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine dollars, London return, the sign in the travel agent window said. But just going to London wasn't enough: once you landed you still had to eat. Always the same in a new city, even if you were only visiting: always back to square one.

Save up a bit more first, she told herself.