Beau looked momentarily startled by her tentative foray into a more personal topic. But she kept her eyes down, as she picked lightly at the embroidery on her duvet cover, so as not to appear challenging. ‘You’re lucky. I miss my brother. I don’t get to see him anywhere near as much as I’d like.’

‘No?’

‘He lives in Geneva so . . .’ She smiled. ‘Ironically, I’m closer to him here than I have been in years and there’s still no time to meet up.’

‘You could get over there surely, for a few days? Or he could come out here? Does he ride?’

‘He’s a skier, like me,’ she said with a rueful grin.

‘Agh, never mind. I guess he can still have some fun,’ he teased.

‘You really love boarding, don’t you?’ she asked, watching him closely. ‘Even more than surfing?’

He shot her a sly look from under his lashes. ‘Don’t tell Kit.’

Clover smiled, but she wondered why it had to be a secret that he loved the snow more than the surf. Moving into this arena had been Kit’s idea, after all. Why couldn’t Beau love it too? ‘You do look completely natural up there. So in your element.’

‘Feels like it’s in my blood.’ He looked around the room idly. ‘Maybe it is. We boarded before we surfed. Our dad taught us.’

‘Oh, really?’ She mentally sifted through the profiles and timelines Matty had spent the summer preparing.

‘Yeah. Everyone thinks we’re Aussies but we’re Kiwis, just with Aussie accents – did you know that?’

‘I did, yes,’ she smiled.

‘Yeah. We were born in Queenstown, South Island, twenty minutes from Coronet Peak. We didn’t move to the Gold Coast till I was five and Kit was ten—’

Clover quickly did the maths: that would have been straight after his parents’ divorce.

‘—and Kit ate up being an Aussie. He just went headlong into the surfing thing. Got so good, so quick. I always just followed him, of course – whatever he did, I did.’

‘But snowboarding was really your great love?’

‘Hey, I was just a toddler when I was first strapped on. What did I know? But there must have been some muscle memory there, I guess. It’s felt so natural being here. Like it was always meant to be.’

‘Well, maybe it was.’

‘I dunno.’ He looked down and Clover could see the guilt on his face. They were here because his brother’s life in the surfing world had fallen apart, refugees from another sport. He wouldn’t countenance the thought that his destiny to board came at the cost of Kit’s destiny not to surf.