Lying awake last night, Kelly had been more scared for Gordon than for Ben. At the bottom of it all, she knew Ben better than Gordon did. Ben was a repository for Gordon’s fears about himself. Gordon was always terrified that Ben might do what he had contemplated doing, as if the generations only refined and advanced your worst impulses. Gordon was the most unlikely narcissist, but a narcissist he was; he wasn’t seeing Ben as an individual, he saw him as a facet of his own fear, a ghost, a parable, a tying of historical loose ends. There had been a night, soon after the break-up, when Kelly and Ben had had a fight. He had stormed out in tears. While Kelly had calmed down, Gordon had been distraught with fear. They had the Find My Phone app, to try to locate the phones that Ben lost on a regular basis, but also as a tracking device. Kelly had told Gordon to relax, but he had cried out in fear and showed her the screen. The tracker had placed Ben in Bluebird Bay. Gordon had run full-tilt for the headland. He had been convinced that the argument had pushed Ben to the worst thing imaginable. It had turned out that the app was not perfectly accurate. He had found Ben, not in the water, but sitting on the cliff having a think. Gordon had been inconsolable.

Kelly held no such fears. She knew Ben spent time on Bluebird’s clifftops when he wanted to be by himself, away from his parents, away from all the riff-raff that blew through their house.

Her mind went back to those days after Owen died. A teenager’s funeral in Bluebird in the seventies was a rare event, before teenagers overdosed, before they jumped, before they dropped acid and thought they were Superman and flew from all the cliffs of Ocean City. When that epidemic hit, the families of those dead kids whited themselves out of Bluebird. But Owen’s death belonged to the age of innocent accidents. Owen’s death, like everything else here, good and bad, was absorbed. Tide went out, tide came in, new sand covered it. Families like Gordon’s cracked on, shaped by their wounds, eyes only on the future because the past could kill them if they let it catch up with them.

Everyone in Bluebird knew there was something about Gordon, something bad that had happened. A brother? Yeah, a brother. Outside the Grimes family, herself and Sam and a handful of others, that was all Owen became: a shadow who never made it past twelve.