You know when you look forward to something so much, like a movie or book that everyone has raved about, and then you actually experience it and it’s not as fantastic as you imagined? That’s exactly how my week in Ragged Point with the kids was going. They simply didn’t have the same affection for the place I did.

Payton loved the beach, but it was too cold to stay in the water all day now, and if she wasn’t kept active, she got bored. The one TV in the shack didn’t have Netflix, Stan, Apple or any of the bells and whistles the kids were used to in Perth and they didn’t want to watch any of my DVDs. I tried to get Payton into some baking, but the only times outside the ocean that she seemed to enjoy herself was when we went to Brewed Awakening or kidnapped Bindi for a couple of hours and took her to the park or the beach. The two girls adored each other. Payton would have made an awesome big sister, but that possibility had flown years ago, so she loved it when Jedda said she could be Bindi’s surrogate sister.

‘What’s a surrogate?’ she asked, sparking a massive in-depth conversation about all the different ways to have a baby. Now Payton had decided that when she grew up, she was going to ‘choose sperm’ like Jedda and have a baby without a man.

‘I think men are more trouble than they’re worth,’ she told me and Jedda, as if she was a middle-aged woman who’d been married for decades.

We’d both stifled smiles. Although in my current predicament—with neither a husband nor a son in my good books—I had to agree, I didn’t want Payton to catch my bitterness towards the opposite sex. Surely there were some good men out there.

Saxon only emerged from his room grudgingly to eat and pee, although he wasn’t eating as much as usual and I feared his showering habits were getting slack, but when I tried to talk to him about both these things, he’d yelled at me to stop being intrusive. Yelling, it appeared, had become part of who he was. He yelled at Payton if she so much as dared to breathe near him, which was one of the reasons I’d ended up letting him hibernate in his bedroom more than I thought healthy. I was trying to be calm and patient as Hayley had advised, but there was only so much any of us could take.

Saxon was waiting on the back porch when Payton, Charlie and I returned from our morning walk along the beach. The sight surprised me because it was earlier than he usually surfaced of late.