The guesthouse itself was a hunting lodge masquerading as the Ritz: every surface, banister, and door handle had ornate polished-wood accents; there was soft lighting from wall-mounted electric lamps made of frosted glass moulded into flowers, and the foyer even had a red carpet, complete with a chandelier hanging low from the roof, glittering beside the second-floor walkway. In fact, everything from the waist up was almost elegant enough to make up for the snow-damaged lower half: the hotel equivalent of taking a pantsless video call in a collared shirt. The carpets, well-worn from stomped snow-caked shoes, sat atop a swollen wooden floor that creaked like it wasn’t quite nailed down, and the patchwork rugs and hastily plastered mice holes evidenced a building maintained by the motto that it was easier to find quick fixes than to get a tradie up the mountain. Not to mention the damp. The whole place smelled like my car after I’d left my sunroof open during a thunderstorm. Altitude adds several stars to a hotel rating, and while this was a two scraping by as a four, it had a cosy charm.

Conversation evaporated upon my entry to the dining room, where everyone was midway through dessert, and I was greeted by the symphony of spoons clinking down on plates. My mother, Audrey, who was at the head of the table, sized me up. She had fishing-wire silver hair tied in a bun, and a scar above her right eye. She hesitated – she may have been deciding whether or not I was my brother (it had been a while since either of us had seen her) – and then pushed her chair back from the table, dropping her cutlery with a clatter. This was an argument-stopping technique I remembered from my childhood.

Marcelo, my stepfather, was sitting to her left. Marcelo is a heavy-set bald man with one of those folds above the back of his neck that I’ve always assumed he has to floss in case mould builds up. He put a heavy hand on Audrey’s wrist. Not in a controlling way; I don’t want to misrepresent my mother’s relationship or invoke any predisposed judgement of stepfathers. You see, my stepfather always wore a late 1980s platinum Presidential Rolex – which, when I’d curiously googled the eye-watering price, I learned weighed just shy of half a kilogram – meaning that everything he did with his right hand was, literally, heavy-handed. The advertisement for the watch, I recalled, was quite ridiculous: An Heirloom Should Be Heavy Enough For History. Marcelo had worn it for as long as I could remember. I assumed I wasn’t in the running to inherit it. Stupid as the slogan was, it was better than some of the others I’d seen – like Three Hundred Metres Depth, Bulletproof Glass: Safe As A Bank Vault – which pretended all millionaires were part-time scuba-instructors.