Lou took her hand and squeezed it. ‘I get it,’ she said.

A triumphant noise broke over the balcony. Dog was yelping happily. Josie was arguing.

‘Don’t they have homes to go to?’ Kelly said with a weak laugh, feeling rocked and shamed but also relieved by Lou’s response to what she had said. ‘You don’t want to be here.’

‘Shouldn’t I be the judge of that?’

‘This place has a darkness,’ Kelly said, but Lou’s eyes reflected the darkness onto her, and she decided she could go no further. ‘It’s not going to be good for you.’

‘I don’t need you to tell me that,’ Lou said, and rewarded her with a softening, almost a smile, that felt all the more precious for being so hard-won. ‘Let’s get rid of that mob.’

As she followed Lou’s shoulders up the stairs, Kelly thought: So this is the point of an omigod-daughter.

‘Eh,’ Kelly said.

Lou stopped, her feet caught on separate steps.

‘You’re teaching him how to make those Italian dishes, aren’t you? Did you get him surfing again?’

‘Nah, not me. He’s probably having an affair.’

THE PRODIGAL STEPSON

The prodigal stepson

Two afternoons later, a Saturday, Ben was walking up the hill from The Lodge to the Bluebird Hilton. His cricket game had finished, and his dad had asked him to come along to visit Grandma Norma in the rehab unit of Capri hospital, where she had been moved from the orthopaedic ward following the operation on the hip she had broken at the country club two weeks earlier. Ben sensed that his dad wanted him as a buffer: Gordon always got on better with Norma when Ben was between them. To sweeten the deal, Gordon had offered Ben the chance to drive the car and get some of his L-plate hours up.

It must have been grandmother day for Ben’s dad, because first he’d had to go to the Hilton for a face-to-face with Grandma Leonie. Of the many plates Dad had to keep spinning, Grandma Leonie was the one he couldn’t let drop, and worst of all, Dad told Ben, she knew it.