The boys’ Catholic school Ben attended was across the road from Bluebird (aka Bloodbath) High School, where Gordon and Kelly had gone in the 1970s and 1980s. Bloodbath was no longer an option, having been converted into a high-performance selective unit for super-talented daily migrants bussed in from other parts of OC. Bloodbath High, suddenly and shockingly one of the top academic schools, lost its connection with the suburb surrounding it. Nobody knew those kids; you never saw them at the beach.

For Ben, who was never a chance of sitting even the entrance exam for Bluebird High, there were few options between the new Bloodbath, Cobcroft Boys’ High, and those temples to wannabeism, the co-ed private schools St Claire’s and Chalk Farm. Neither Gordon nor Kelly was Catholic, but Kelly had had Ben strategically baptised to qualify him for the convenient and relatively cheap St Pat’s. In happier days, Gordon and Kelly had agreed on St Pat’s as a best of all worlds for Ben—and the Catholics were not like they used to be, everyone assured them. Since Jude Oxenford, who had been a schoolmate of Gordon and Kelly at Bloodbath back in the day, had taken over as principal, St Pat’s had become off limits for priests and therefore, supposedly, safer for children.

‘Sure you don’t need help?’ Gordon said, cutting his eyes at the laptop open on Ben’s desk. He pretended not to have noticed Ben hurriedly changing screens.

‘What? I’m good.’

Ben was such a late developer that he was sixteen before he started to hide things from Gordon and Kelly. This had coincided with the separation, so it was hard to tell the difference between Ben punishing them or just growing up.

‘So you reckon I should move Up North?’ Gordon said.

‘Wait, what?’

‘Your mum told me, after we got back. You reckon I should leave The Lodge, head up there?’

In the recent school holidays, Gordon had taken Ben to Beckham Bay, an eight-hour drive north of Ocean City, where they had stayed with Gordon’s cousin Rachel, her husband Jason and their three girls. Up North was Bluebird unspoilt, the other side of history’s sliding doors. On a stretch of lagoon sand, a temporary community re-formed during each school vacation: families ate together and gossiped and socialised in ways they never could in their regular city lives. In that pop-up enchanted hamlet, you enjoyed more community with your one-week-a-year neighbours than the pests you put up with for the other fifty-one. When Gordon went Up North he didn’t know if he was in his element or in a cage. This time, his first holiday without Kelly, he wondered if his natural element was a cage.

‘Me. Up North. Without you,’ Gordon said.

‘What? I dunno. Maybe.’

‘Is it for my sake, or to give you an excuse to see that boy?’