While his mother spoke, Gordon kept a close eye on his father. Just that morning, a ninety-two-year-old resident of the nursing home had been caught crawling through a hedge wearing army camouflage. You couldn’t make it up. The peaceful suburbs of leafy northern Ocean City were actually a gulag of prison camps filled with elderly male inmates intent on freedom but prevented by their individual misanthropy from cooperating to organise a mass breakout. If only they knew how many of their kind harboured the same obsession, they could start a revolution.

‘Did I tell you how long it took me to find a parking space at the home?’ Norma went on. ‘Did I tell you’ was purely rhetorical. Whichever of Norma’s conversations were not about Asian doctors were about parking, the two subjects being subtly connected. ‘I was so flustered I pressed the wrong lift button and went to the Alzheimer’s floor. I can’t tell you how awful it is. Dr Tang told me that one of the …’

Gordon had gone there once too, a mistake he had not repeated. Ron’s floor, Banksia, was identical to Eucalyptus, Boronia and Grevillia, whereas Acacia, the Alzheimer’s floor, had fences around the beds and locks on the rooms.

‘… but Jada came and rescued me,’ Norma said. ‘The staff on the Alzheimer’s floor are Indians too. Isn’t she lovely!’

Gordon was used to trailing around after his parents in damage control. He liked Jada and had more than once speculated on what would happen if he asked her out for a coffee. But he was too scared—of his parents finding out, of the gossip among Jada’s co-workers, of Jada turning him down.

‘I don’t know what they’re feeding him,’ Norma said, rattling through her agenda. ‘They’re told no protein, no sugar, no fat, but of course they do what they please. Just up here, will you? Not so close!’

As he parked the cart according to Norma’s instructions while she got out to putt on the green, Gordon’s mind wandered back to the morning’s events. If Leonie was going to sell The Lodge from under him and Kelly, why had she given Gordon his one-third share in the first place? Was he nothing to Leonie but an instrument of spite? What kind of monster would let him in there, knowing how much he treasured The Lodge, knowing he would bankrupt himself trying to save it, only to rip it away from him? Gordon remembered Dog saying Leonie was five steps ahead of him. True: there was some key part of the puzzle he was missing, some leap that might enable him to scale those five steps, even get ahead. It felt like his ability to grasp her strategy was blocked by some fundamental character flaw. That old shadow at the door, standing between him and the other side.

Which reminded him of his mother.