In the equipment room, he stripped off his wet suit. He was wearing his undershorts beneath it, and his skin was pimpled with the cold. But this didn’t seem to bother him because he didn’t shiver. Instead, he carried the wet suit to a large, heavy plastic rubbish bin in the corner of the room, and he dumped it inside without ceremony. The dripping surfboard he carried into another room-an inner room, Kerra saw, a room she had not yet investigated in the hotel-and there he put it into a cupboard. This he locked with a padlock, which he then tested, as if to make sure the cupboard’s contents were safe from prying eyes. From family eyes, she realised. From her eyes and from Santo’s eyes because her mother must have known this secret all along.

Santo, Kerra thought. The sheer hypocrisy of it all. She simply did not understand.

Her father used his T-shirt to dry himself off. He tossed it to one side and donned his pullover. He motioned for her to turn her back, which she did and heard the sound of him removing his undershorts, plopping them onto the floor, and then zipping his trousers. Then he said, “All right.” She turned back to him, and they faced each other. He waited, clearly, for her questions.

She determined to surprise him as he’d surprised her. So what she said was, “It’s because of her, isn’t it?”

“Who?”

“Mum. You couldn’t surf and watch her at the same time, so you stopped surfing. That’s why, isn’t it? I saw you, Dad. How long has it been? Twenty years? More?”

“Yes. Since before you were born.”

“So you put on your wet suit, you went out there, you took the first wave that came along, and that was it. No trouble. It was easy for you. It was child’s play for you. It was nothing. Like walking. Like breathing.”

“Yes. All right. It was.”

“Which means…How long had you surfed when you stopped?”

Her father picked up his T-shirt and folded it neatly, despite its condition, which was damp through. He said, “Most of my life. It’s what we did in those days. There was nothing else. You’ve seen how your grandparents live. We had the beach in the summer and school the rest of the time. There was work at home, trying to keep that bloody house from falling apart, and when there was free time, we surfed. There was no money for holidays. No cheap flights to Spain. It wasn’t like today.”

“But you stopped.”

“I stopped. Things change, Kerra.”

“Yes. She came along. That was the change. You got caught up in her, and by the time you saw what she’s really like, it was too late. You couldn’t get away. So you had to make a choice and you chose her.”

“It’s not that simple.” He moved past her, out of the smaller room and into the larger equipment room. He waited for her to follow him and when she was with him, he shut and locked the smaller room’s door.

“Did Santo know?”

“About?”

“This.” She gestured to the door he’d locked. “You were good, weren’t you? I saw enough to know that. So why…?” Suddenly, she was as close to weeping as she’d come in the last terrible thirty hours or so.

He was watching her. She saw that he looked ineffably sad, and in that sadness she understood that while they were a family-the four of them then, the three of them now-they were a family in name only. Beyond a common surname, they were and had always been merely a repository of secrets. She’d believed that all of these secrets had to do with her mother, with her mother’s troubles, her mother’s periods of bizarre alteration. And these were secrets to which she herself had long been a party because there was no way to avoid knowing them when the simple act of coming home from school might put her in the midst of what had always been referred to as “a bit of an embarrassing situation.” Don’t breathe a word to Dad, darling. But Dad knew anyway. All of them knew by the clothes she wore, the tilt of her head when she was speaking, the rhythm of her sentences, the tap of her fingers on the table during dinner, and the restlessness of her gaze. And the red. They knew from the red. For Kerra and Santo, what came on the heels of that colour was a prolonged visit to the elder Kernes and “What’s the cow up to now?” from her granddad. But “Say nothing to your grandparents about this, understand?” was the injunction that Kerra and Santo had lived by. Keep the faith, keep the secret, and eventually things would return to normal, whatever normal was.

But now Kerra understood there were even more secrets than those which she’d kept about her mother: arcane bits of knowledge that went beyond Dellen’s convoluted psyche and touched upon Kerra’s father as well. Embracing this stinging piece of truth, Kerra realised there was no solid place to put down her foot if she wished to walk forward and pass into the future.

“I was thirteen years old,” she said. “There was a bloke I liked, called Stuart. He was fourteen and he had terrible spots, and I liked him. The spots made him seem safe, you know? Only he wasn’t safe. It’s funny actually because all I’d done was go to the kitchen to fetch us some jam tarts and a drink-less than five minutes-and that’s all it took. Stuart didn’t understand what was going on. But I knew, didn’t I, because I’d grown up knowing. So had Santo. Only he was safe because-let’s face it-he was just like her.”

“Not in all ways,” her father said. “No. Not that.”

“That,” she said. “You know it. That. And in ways that affected me.”

“Ah. Madlyn.”

“We were best friends. Before Santo got his hands on her.”

“Kerra, Santo didn’t intend-”

“Yes, he did. He bloody well did. And the worst part of it was that he didn’t need to pursue her. He was already pursuing…what…three other girls? Or was it that he’d already been through three other girls?” She knew that she sounded what she was: bitter. But it seemed to her in that moment that nothing in her life had ever been secure from depredation.

Her father said, “Kerra, people go their own way. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

“Do you actually believe that? Is that how you defend her? Defend him?”

“I’m not-”

“You are. You always have done, at least when it comes to her. She’s made a fool of you for my entire life and I’ll put money down on the bet she’s made a fool of you since the day you met her.”

If Ben was offended by Kerra’s remark, he didn’t say so. Rather he said, “It’s not your mother I’m talking about, love, and it’s not Santo. It’s this Stuart lad, whoever he was. It’s Madlyn Angarrack.” He paused before finishing with, “It’s Alan, Kerra. It’s everyone. People will go their own way. You’re best off to let them.”

“Like you did, you mean?”

“I can’t explain things further.”

“Because it’s a secret?” she asked, and she did not care that the question sounded like a taunt. “Like everything else in your life? Like the surfing?”

“We don’t choose where to love. We don’t choose who to love.”

“I don’t believe that for a moment,” she said. “Tell me why you didn’t like Santo surfing.”

“Because I believed no good would come of it.”

“Is that what happened to you?”

He said nothing. For a moment, Kerra thought he would not reply. But at last he said what she knew he would say. “Yes. Not a single good came of it for me. So I lay down the board and got on with my life.”

“With her,” Kerra noted.

“Yes. With your mother.”