Simon MacDonald

Regimented is definitely the word.

He goes for a run at the same time every day.

He has a different day of the week for each household task.

So the kitchen might be Monday.

Mopping the family room floor might be Wednesday.

He prides himself on his very careful driving.

He answers to someone he calls the traffic god.

He polices the other people in his building to make sure that they follow the recycling rules.

He's a fairly uptight man.

He comes from a big family.

He's got four sisters who are all pretty rowdy and rambunctious, and they see him, they tease him quite a lot for being what they call, quite accurately, a fuss budget.

I think he's a sympathetic character, but...

I wasn't wild about him myself.

I read something, Cassie, really interesting in an interview that she gave that she writes things out in longhand and then she reads the book into a tape recorder and she listens back to it to make sure that the dialogue rings true for her, for each character.

Yeah.

And there's a reference to how his parents sounded like that as well, that his background was that of a big, noisy, chaotic family.

And you then get a bit of a sense that his own sort of customs and behaviour seem to be a bit of a reaction to the chaos that he's grown up in, a deliberate choice by him not to be like that.

Oh, no, I don't think so.

That happens pretty early, Kate.

So, yes, Micah gets a shock one day when there's a knock on his door and he opens the door and there's a rather preppy, handsome, wealthy-looking young man.