‘Clo!’ Mia’s voice tilted up with excitement and Clover could practically hear her feet come to a stop. No doubt she had a laundry basket on her hip or was whisking a perinaise sauce, little Brady careening off the walls and wanting to be out on the waves with his brothers. ‘How was it?’

‘Well, we did it again. Another piece of hardware that says the world frickin’ loves your husband!’

‘. . . Aaah.’ The sound was like an exhale. ‘He’ll be so stoked.’

Clover frowned. She had spent too much time with this family not to know immediately when something was up. ‘Everything okay?’

‘Oh, yeah. Yeah.’

But Clover wasn’t fooled by her friend’s attempts at upbeat. ‘Is it a bad day?’

There was a hesitation. ‘Well, yeah . . . a bit, I guess.’

‘Is he up?’

Another hesitation. ‘No.’

‘Yesterday?’

‘. . . No.’

‘Shit,’ Clover whispered, feeling the shine come off her night. She looked down at the trophy in her lap – at the laughter and tears on one face, this very situation captured in bronze. She had been celebrating her triumph all night, while Cory and his family continued to live another day with the fallout of his accident. Clover knew she was the only person outside their family who really understood what post-concussion syndrome actually meant; she was the only person who had seen Mia sobbing on the sand, bewailing the fact that the man she had married was gone and she was living with someone fundamentally altered, forever broken. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Hey, you know the drill.’ Mia’s voice was flat, matter-of-fact. ‘We roll with the punches.’

‘Is it his lungs?’ But it could be anything – the headaches, the double vision, the mood swings, panic attacks, anxiety, deep depression.

There was another pause – a longer one this time – and when Mia’s voice came back on the line, it was thick with checked emotion. ‘. . . He’s just under one of his black clouds. It’ll pass. We just have to sit it out. He’ll be up again tomorrow, I bet.’

Not necessarily, Clover knew. She had spent two weeks sitting in a dark room with Cory, listening to his angry silence, his frustrated screams, his moans of pain. Much of that time she had been frightened by his unpredictability, Mia beseeching her to come out – that it was bad enough enduring it on the other side of the wall where the sun still fell in through the shutters – but only by sitting in it with him had Clover been able to earn his trust, pull down his walls and get him to talk. By the time they had both stumbled from that back room, she had lost four pounds and it had taken a day for her eyes to tolerate the daylight again. For Clover, such an episode had been a one-off, but for Cory, these depressions rolled in as regularly as storm clouds. He couldn’t function through them, certainly couldn’t work.