I had time before my meeting with Dave, so I went down and stood on the beachfront. With the old shacks gone, it looked a lot nicer, the kind of beach you’d enjoy taking your children to, the kind teenagers went to for bonfires and necking. The water was rough and the tide high. It wouldn’t take much to flood the entire beach and reach the road. Our street was perpendicular to the beach road, and it got hilly farther up, but my old house was only about nine feet above sea level. That’s all it would take to reach the bottom of the front door. Maybe the water would creep in like fog on little cat’s feet or something beautiful like that. I wondered if which one of us still owned it had insurance on it, or, indeed, if my father had ever had it insured, at all.
I’d left my car parked in the dr
