I’d met Sam’s dad a few times in the last eight months since Anika and Luca had become a couple. His name was Ian and he seemed nice enough, except he lived all the way on the other side of the city and didn’t come down very often to see Sam. He hadn’t even been to visit since Anika and Sam moved in with us, and now he was away over the holidays with his new wife. They’d sent Sam a present from Queensland, but it arrived two weeks after Christmas—one of those Super Soakers. Sam had seemed disappointed. I think he’d been expecting something different, or else just wanted his dad to be there to give it to him in person.

Our chair was coming to the end of the downward loop, speeding up a little as the cable wrapped around a steel pole and pulley at the bottom of the mountain. A few people in front of us were hopping off there, maybe to go and explore along one of the hiking trails, but most people were like us, staying on and making their way back up.

Sam opened his eyes when we got to the bottom, and one of the chairlift attendants nodded at us when I didn’t make a move to lift the safety bar and get off.

Instead our chair started making the climb back up, and that’s when Sam said, “You’re lucky that Luca does this with you.” He took a shaky little breath. This part was scarier: climbing higher and higher up with your back to the plummeting view.

Sam kept talking, even as he closed his eyes again. “I mean, it’s not like Luca has to do this kinda stuff, since he’s not . . .”

He didn’t finish but he didn’t need to. When Anika and Luca started dating, the dad thing was one of the first that Sam asked me about. Or rather, told me about.

“Luca’s not your dad, obviously,” he’d said one evening when the parents had lumped us together after dinner. Like sticking us in the living room with old board games and no TV was going to make us fast friends.

I’d glared at him, and his face went tomato red—right to the tips of his earlobes.

He had meant that Luca and I look nothing alike. Luca’s father was Italian, and he married Luca’s mother when he migrated to England, before they decided to settle in Australia, where Luca was born. I never met Luca’s parents, because they died before he married Mom. I’ve seen photos: he looks a lot like his father with the same kind, dark eyes. Luca is also tall but broad, with dark, olive skin and he wears his black hair in a policeman’s buzz cut.

“I just mean he’s not, like, your actual dad—right?”