On one wall of our bedroom, Lacy has put her white wooden sign that says ‘dream’ in a cursive font, with candle holders beneath the R and the M, each holding the stub of a candle. It’s this sign that reminds me there are few true deal-breakers in real life when you’re attracted to someone – you can make whatever list you like but, in the end, you can see past most of it. I’m not sure that Lacy does dream, not at the moment. Not in the bright, hopeful way she was supposed to when given the sign at graduation by her best college friend, who moved to St Petersburg, Florida, to be with a man and who now works in a shop there, selling essential oils.

Selling real estate works the same way as compatibility deal-breakers. My course taught me that. As the realtor you pitch and push, against resistance to a point but, if they cross the line and want the place, all of a sudden they’re working with you. They go from suspicion and scoping out problems to loving this and loving that and excusing the awful cupboard handles, the lime tiles in the half-bathroom, which they laugh about and swear they’ll replace the instant they move in.

Cedar’s bedroom door is open and he is sitting cross-legged on the floor, hunched over whatever personal project he’s working on. All I can see from behind him is that it involves the kitchen scissors and a lot of tiny paper scraps. His room is full of crumpled Pokémon cards, forgotten sketches of fierce gun-toting creatures and dispersed pieces of magic tricks, along with a significant percentage of the world’s supply of half-constructed and half-deconstructed Lego. It’s a place from which Frankenstein vehicles occasionally emerge but mostly entropy takes hold.

His head, with its straight blond tufts, looks like an old man’s from behind. He sits like a tiny elderly cobbler making slippers, but in his case using vast amounts of sticky tape as the main means of binding. He draws another length of it, tears it on the serrated cutter, and it swings across and sticks to his arm. He carefully peels it off and presses it onto something on the floor in front of him.

He has a loaded nerf gun beside him. You can never be too careful in this house. Nerf enemies might be anywhere. He denies using the inflatable solar system mobile above his bed for target practice, but I’m sure that’s not true. Only Uranus is keeping its shape. The nerf concept is barely holding him though. His father has enough real guns for a backwoods militia, and I know Cedar has fired a few of the lighter ones.

I call out, ‘Hey, Cee,’ once the sticky tape is firmly down.

‘Hey, bruh,’ he says, and pulls the next length of tape, checking it for size.