Cedar talks like someone being raised by YouTubers and video games. We’ve been losing the screen-time battle lately. The price of a human child is eternal vigilance. Drop your guard and you end up parenting someone who’s a slack-jawed edit of all the screen content they’ve absorbed. When ‘bro’ became ‘bruh’ I don’t know, but it seems it did. In our life, I’d guess July.

‘Just letting you know I’m home. Bruh.’

He laughs. ‘You don’t say “bruh”. I say “bruh”. You’re way too old.’

‘Just trying it out for size, bruh. Thinking I could get to like it.’

He swivels around to face me properly for the first time, but only so I can see his expression, YouTube’s best version of withering condescension. ‘I’d recommend you stop now. I can’t see it working for you.’

‘Appreciate your input, bruh.’

‘Still not working.’

‘Just remember to put the scissors back when you’re done.’

On that dull note, my right to even attempt ‘bruh’ permanently revoked, I make my retreat down the hall. Next to the water heater, in an unpainted recess designed for storage, I have an old school desk and a filing cabinet. In realty-speak, it might technically count as a study nook, though no-one would be so optimistic as to call it that. The MacBook Pro on the desk looks like it’s been taken hostage from a better time. The frame around the recess suggests it once had double doors and was actually a large cupboard, but those were removed before we moved in.

I have my report to write on Ellen Baker’s house, and now also a sales agreement to draw up. I can email the report through to the office, along with the news of the listing – no doubt bells will ring and cymbals sound – but the agreement requires two original signed paper copies, one for Ellen and one for filing at McCord HQ.

Down the hall, the doof-doof-doof of a salvo of nerf bullets breaks the silence and Cedar calls out something that sounds like, ‘You’ll never take me alive, Mazatlan!’

Cedar’s father, Travis, lives off the grid outside Hope, which is already outside everything else. It’s on the opposite shore of the Turnagain Arm, almost within sight from the Girdwood side but a fifty-minute drive due to the water.

Travis installs and repairs generators and, from what people say, does it well. He is suspicious of the motives of power companies that are pushing wind and hydro – it’s a devious plan to get us all on the grid and, once you’re on the grid, they own you.