At Simon’s most recent pilot’s medical, they picked up the lipid problem that led to the CT coronary angiogram that led to the CABG. Somewhere along that chain of events, he was grounded. Somewhere a little further along, the grounding became permanent. Cathay is transitioning him into a training role. He’s cut meat from his diet, cut back on wine, scoured the internet for kale smoothie recipes that aren’t awful. He looks drawn and hungry, and older. He looks like someone who has made eye contact with death and is staging a retreat from it as best he can, without breaking its gaze as he backs away.

Fifty-five arrived a little over two weeks ago. Lacy and I couldn’t make it here then, since it was school term time in Alaska, but he lined up flights for the first dates we could make work.

It was the third heart attack that got our father, at fifty-eight. Simon has mentioned that number too. He has felt it closing in, has faced the prospect of a life unled, decades of it, and here he is, hand on his heart, taking all possible measures to defeat his crappy genes and past hedonism. His LDL cholesterol was a disaster that had somehow not been picked up before. Our father’s was the same. Mine isn’t, so far. I had it checked around the time Simon had his bypass. I will have it checked again.

But our father’s first heart attack came at forty-four. It brought us home early from London. So early that London, to me, is no more than a feeling of being too hot on buses in too many layers of clothes, our mother wrangling me in and out of coats in doorways and cloakrooms, and the times I stood holding screws or a measuring tape for our handyman, Emerson, who was always over fixing things. I can’t remember a single true London thing, though there are photos of me in front of several – Big Ben, Nelson’s Column, the obvious places. Me with my pale grinning wedge of face between my beanie and the turned-up collar of my parka. I remember the taste of that collar and what the zip felt like in my mouth. I sucked it on buses sometimes.

‘I’ll get there,’ Simon says, still scanning the unremarkable hill as though he should take a flag up it and plant it on the top. ‘I never walked here before. Never. Not till a month or so ago. And it’s been just down the road for years. I don’t even know what’s over the top of that hill. Well, I do from Google Maps. I’ve seen the tracks on there. It turns out there’s miles of them. I live, what, two Ks away, but I’ve never been on them.’

He shakes his head, at the thought of these mysterious untravelled paths. I have a feeling he is about to attempt to quote Robert Frost.