Real estate. I need to stop waiting for Rob McCord to appear, pull myself out of the rabbit hole of times long gone and get back to the Alaska of now.

I check the paperwork one final time. Soon Ellen’s house will join the grid of for-sale cards on the board in the window. One card with ‘sold’ stamped in red across its pictured home will be removed and hers will take its place within the fairy-light perimeter. There are no empty spots – that’s a real-estate rule.

When I open the tinted-glass door to the agency, Veronica at the counter has already seen me approaching.

‘Mike,’ she says, smiling. She has her hair tied back in a ponytail and the top button of her striped business shirt is undone, revealing a small gold cross on a short chain. Her jacket is hung over her chair and the reception area has its usual sense of trapped artificial warmth. ‘New listing. Good news.’

She reaches across the counter for the paperwork. The three agents’ offices behind her, all glass-fronted, have no-one in them, their matching five-castor chairs pushed into their desks, all documents sitting in tidy piles. No coincidence in that. Productive-but-organised is the look they’re to aim for. There are none of those pressures in the downstairs cupboard in Girdwood.

‘Rob should be here in a half-hour to sign them,’ Veronica says. ‘Between open houses. Maybe forty minutes. Which package did the sellers choose?’

‘Basic. Basic’s definitely the way to go with this one.’ It would be better to explain it to Rob personally, to present it as, to use the agency’s language, a client-centred choice. ‘The real-estate websites, card in the window here, budget photo package. Plus Glacier City Gazette.’

‘Awesome. I’ll do the welcome letter and put the folder together.’ She checks the final page of each document to see that they are both signed, then sets them on the desk. Her nails click on the hard surface. She brings her hands back to the gel wrist rest in front of her keyboard. She looks as if she might type something, but then glances up at me. ‘Did you want to stay, or . . .’

‘No, I’ve got a couple of things to do while I’m in Anchorage.’ The foyer has two chairs, a water cooler and a rubber plant in a pot. I would invent things, if I didn’t have them to do. ‘I’ll drop back in after that. Thanks for getting it sorted.’

‘Awesome,’ she says, grinning at this resolution. Ah-some. There is no ‘w’ in the American ‘awesome’.

She’s typing before the door swings shut behind me, entering Ellen’s name into the pro forma breezy welcome letter, which will be printed onto paper with a postage-stamp-sized Rob McCord head shot in one corner.