She slipped into the passing lane, cruised around a silver BMW and pulled hard back into the left lane.

‘Straight talk, remember?’

‘Straight talk,’ he echoed. ‘Yes, I did wonder if he was seeing someone else at first. When men do something out of character, there’s usually a woman involved. Now, in a strange sort of way, I hope that’s what this is.’

‘You hope he’s having an affair?’

‘Compared to the alternative, frankly, yes.’

She eased off the pedal. ‘What’s the alternative?’ she asked.

‘I’ve been thinking about what his boss told you. Spiritual distress. I hadn’t heard that term before, but it pretty much sums up a long period in John’s teen years. For a while there he got … dark.’

She nodded. ‘I remember the photos from his deb. It looked like Alice Cooper’s wedding.’

‘It wasn’t just the black clothing and the heavy metal music,’ Fisher said. ‘He was obsessed with spirit boards and demonology and murder. He started reading horror novels by this mad American – Lovecroft? Something like that. And he was constantly researching a hundred-year-old poet called Aleister Crowley, who ran an occult religion. Pam pushed the Bible on him, which went about as well as you’d expect. That’s when she started volunteering at every mass, like she thought she could make up for it.’

‘That was a long time ago, Fisher. We all go through phases when we’re young and trying to figure out who we are. You might be putting things together that don’t really fit.’

‘Yeah. I suppose I’m just trying to find something to explain all this.’

Kate was troubled by her father-in-law’s words, but she was also relieved to see him so emotionally vulnerable when for so long he’d appeared cold and distant. It made him seem three-dimensionally human.

Fisher turned, looked out the window, and didn’t talk for the rest of the trip.

The giant steel doors of the ferry opened like the jaws of a leviathan, and Kate drove inside. Ahead of them was a rusted out old campervan with a bumper sticker on the rear window that declared, We’re spending our kids’ inheritance.

The last time Kate had come to Belport was six months earlier, when the weather was so hot you couldn’t sit out on the top deck without 50+ sunscreen. People were getting around in board shorts and bikinis, and there was a fifteen-minute wait at the kiosk. The undercarriage of the ferry had been jammed with traffic: cars filled with camping equipment and kayaks tied to roof racks. Now the ferry was practically empty.