The TV is on when we get back. The TV is always on. Simon and Faye’s helper Jonalyn is emptying the dishwasher, crouching down lifting plates up to the counter, her feet in old Hello Kitty slides, her sleek black ponytail gathered in a simple elastic. In the Philippines, she has a son Cedar’s age and a daughter two years younger, living with grandparents. We’ve shown each other photos. She skypes them most days, helps with their homework.

‘Good walk?’ she says over her shoulder, mostly to me.

‘Yeah.’ I’m out of water and ready for another drink. ‘It was good to see the neighbourhood. No sign of Lacy yet?’

‘Not yet.’ She stands up and sets the final plate on the stack. ‘Faye has had breakfast. She’s going soon, I think. To the conference.’

Lacy is learning about the brutality of jetlag for the first time. In time-zone terms, she has lived her entire life between Honolulu and Los Angeles, between Hawaiian and US Pacific Time. Until yesterday, the only reason she had a passport was a trip to Vancouver and Whistler before Cedar was born. Last night, in the hours when sleep should be deepest, she was wide awake, staring at the ceiling, head full of who knows what.

‘There’s filtered water in the fridge,’ Jonalyn says when I move towards the kitchen sink, unscrewing my bottle top. ‘Nice and cool. Let me.’

‘It’ll really work better if you just give in,’ Simon says. ‘Jonalyn runs a tight ship.’

‘I do,’ she says. ‘It’s better.’

She pours us each a glass, then gets back to putting the plates away.

The ground floor of the house is a single room, with an open kitchen, dining and lounge, and windows on all sides. Against the far wall, beyond the dining table, are two old red doors, a pair. They’re each semicircular, meeting at the diameter, and set in black-and-gilt carved frames that act as a square to the red circle. They came from a restaurant once owned by Faye’s family, the Lam family, in a building in Central that fell to progress in the nineties. They are the only noticeably Chinese feature of the room.

The dining table is solid and dark and very British. The lounge suite in the other half of the room is modern and from nowhere in particular, arranged around a coffee table and a large-screen TV set to CNN. Behind the furthest armchair, between it and an upright piano, is the glass case Simon announced when we arrived as his ‘cabinet of curiosities’. He took us through its contents then, our bags still at our feet, and put Lacy’s developing eye-glaze down to jetlag. If he quizzed us on it now, I would fare better than she would, but not much.