His onsite van is a three-minute drive up the dirt road from the point. When he gets there, Kelly is waiting. It is her first visit since Gordon moved a few months earlier, after his father’s funeral. Ben, who still needs to get his hours up for his licence, coaxed Kelly into acting as his instructor for the return trip from Ocean City.

The van sits on the border of Rachel and Jason’s property. Gordon finds Kelly smoking a joint with her feet on the balcony rail. She seems pleased to see his fifth-hand ute. He’s already told her, proudly, that it’s an ’03 Commodore. He hoses down his surfboard and rinses sand off his feet, drops his board shorts, dries himself and changes into a pair of Okanuis with a hibiscus pattern that Kelly gave him as a going-away present.

‘Don’t mind me,’ she says.

‘Just reminding you of what you’re missing.’

‘Where did Ben go?’

Gordon smiles. ‘Guess.’

‘Aw, he didn’t want to come all the way up here for some Mum time?’ She stubs her roach into an empty UDL can by her feet. The fact that Ben has reconnected with the boy prompts unspoken celebration between her and Gordon. Ben was knocked about by the events at the end of last year. He was in trouble for stealing the cricket bat, and devastated over The Lodge, but his deeper sadness lingered over Daniel’s sudden departure from St Pat’s. Daniel was never his true friend, he knew that, but all the same, to find out that he was a fraud, an adult, cut Ben deeply. He knew Daniel had his torments and his secrets; he’d thought they sprang from a different source.

‘Glad you’ve improved your habits,’ Gordon says, nodding at Kelly’s litter can.

‘Wouldn’t want to cause a fire.’

Gordon pulls a face and leans into his bar fridge, grabs a can of beer for himself and another UDL for Kelly, before settling down to watch the forest turn blue in the setting sun. He can never stop loving this about Kelly: she was the first to laugh with him about the fire, and the first to cry with him about his father. Ron’s death, coming so soon after the loss of The Lodge, hits him subcutaneously. He can be fine for ninety percent of the time and raving mad the rest. At Kelly’s urging, he accepted an invitation from Rachel and Jason to come up here as the ‘probationary editor’ of their regional newspaper, to live on their farm, to recuperate, and maybe to contemplate a future. So far, it has been so good.

‘You heard about Capri Council?’ Kelly asks.

Gordon nods. ‘Frontal’s gone?’

‘Fifty years of Abottemeys running Bluebird, just like that. Cheers.’

They clink cans.

‘Daniel went to Greece to meet his mother’s family.’

‘Frontal too?’