By the time Cedar turned up in cubs, I’d had several years of alternating between Alyeska and Cardrona, often with time in Brisbane in between, in May and November. I told Lacy I was done with that, and ready to stay in one place, ski one season only. I said it too soon after we met, maybe. She treated it like a line at first, something I regularly ran with the more appealing single moms, but it was an idea that had been coming, even if I hadn’t said it aloud until then.

I showed her my email declining Cardrona before I sent it, I stopped my transient life and I started working construction for Wade in the following spring. I joined his pool of seasonal labour, May to November. Anchored down in Anchorage. I must have heard that from Michelle Shocked a thousand times in the late eighties, and one day I realised it was me.

Wade sold me the van I was T-boned in, for a family price. As it was towed away, a buckled ruin, I’m sure he watched it wondering if he should have got more money for it.

I had weeks of icing my knee after gym sessions, but it doesn’t need that now. The muscles are learning their new ways and know they’ve done a workout, but the pain is in the background.

Inside, the music has stopped – the lesson is over. Every day as I go up the front steps, I wonder which Lacy I’ll be getting when I go in, whether the day has lifted her at all, or dropped her like a sack. By the time I’m at the front door, I can hear her voice in the lounge room, updating the parent who’s been waiting. I hang my jacket on a peg in the entry. Through the inner door, which is half open, I can see Lacy from behind. She’s barefoot, her blonde hair pulled into a ponytail and held there with elastic. Her top looks loose on her, her sleeves pulled up most of the way to the elbows.

‘It’s not the fingering with the left hand,’ she says, holding her own left hand high and twirling her fingers on an imaginary fingerboard. ‘The fingering is good. It’s the bowing technique.’ She swings her right elbow up. ‘That’s what I want her to work on. With a higher elbow, she won’t pull the bow down against the strings so much and a lot of those crunches will go.’

The parent is a mother I’ve seen a couple of times before. She’s holding her phone in her hand. She was probably killing time on it when the music-room door opened at the end of the lesson, crushing candy, dropping some likes on friends’ Instagram pics.

She nods and says, ‘Sure, sure.’ She’s dressed in a tracksuit and runners, with a tote bag over one shoulder.

Her daughter must be about six, her quarter-sized viola in its case at her feet, music bag propped against it.