Sophie MacAllister came to Garnet Creek as a backpacker, planning to stay a week.

That was a long time ago now. These days, she’s Miss Sophie to a roomful of four-year-olds at the preschool, and the woman at the front desk of the Happy Outback Hotel who keeps the bookings, the dining-room covers, and most of Jill’s paperwork ticking along.

Sophie has spent the past year booking other people’s rooms, setting out other people’s tablecloths, and her days at the preschool reading stories to other people’s children, and has begun to suspect — with some private alarm — that arranging everyone else’s life is not, as it turns out, the same as having one.

Sam Whitlock is back at the Happy Outback Hotel. He’s an agronomist out of Wagga, three years on from his wife’s funeral, with a furious fifteen-year-old daughter waiting for him at the kitchen table back home. He has come north a second time because the family farm will not, on its own, see his Tess through Year Twelve, and Sam Whitlock’s quiet, inherited dream of a small place that lasts is, this April, fairly close to running out.

Neither of them is looking. Sam has Tess to think about, and a paddock back home, and a kind of grief that doesn’t let go in a hurry. Sophie, for her part, has long since decided she is not the kind of woman things happen to.

But the preschool needs a windbreak if the enrolment is going to hold. The fundraiser is on Sophie’s list. And the man she just handed the key to Room Three knows about trees.

Can two people who have stopped expecting their own happy ending find one — slowly, carefully, and with the whole of Garnet Creek looking on — on a verandah in autumn?