‘I’m going round Trina’s.’

‘Again?’

Kiama nods. In the last month she’s been the one person he’s found he could talk to. It was easy telling her about Mum and Kenya and Yvonne and Dad. He loved the way she listened to him without bringing in the dramatics and he realised he liked her more now than when he kissed her drunkenly at Yates’s after work in the summer.

‘You been spending a lot of time with that girl.’

‘Yeah. She’s nice.’

‘So, what’s going on with you two? Are you sleeping with her or—’

‘Boundaries,’ Kiama shouts, but Dad just laughs. ‘What are you doing with all these boxes?’

‘I’ve been trying to untangle these lights for ages. You’re good at stuff like this.’

‘Am I?’ Kiama asks.

Dad’s expression drops, he is trying, but it’s constant and a little jarring. Kiama sighs and walks over. Dad goes to hand him the lights but pulls back. ‘Are you expecting a cold snap?’

Kiama huffs and pulls off his jacket, catching Dad’s half smile as he hands the lights over.

It’s going to take time to fully get back to normal, to how they used to be. The first few days home were the worst. It felt like the whole experience had finally caught up with him and coming off that plane and into the same arrivals hall he probably walked into when he was eight years old broke him completely. But he didn’t want Dad’s comfort; he didn’t want anything from him.

Kiama even refused to get in the car at first, but it was so stupid, he knew, deep down, that he was too tired to do anything other than be driven home. They didn’t talk about any of it at first, then one evening it started to come out. Slowly at first, with Kiama sharing stories about learning to skip with the kids from the orphanage, about Delia freaking out over his ringworm and about getting punched by some obnoxious Kiwi backpacker in a bar. It reminded him of when he first came back from Barcelona, of how he’d ramped up the stories for comic effect. But this time the laughter stopped abruptly on the first mention of Yvonne and Dad waited for Kiama’s lead.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he asked finally.

Dad picked up his glass to find it empty. ‘When was I meant to tell you? You were a kid. You had other stuff going on. Then, you were grown and it didn’t seem like it mattered anymore.’

‘But when I met up with her? When I first started talking about going back to Kenya?’

‘I’ve had you in this little bubble all these years. I wasn’t ready to let you see what I was before.’

‘Before what?’