Harry and Rory burst out laughing, leaning against one another in their mirth. ‘It’s all gone,’ Harry crowed.

‘Fantastic,’ she muttered, and bought them hot buttered toast to try and soak some of the alcohol up, and hot chocolate, as each declared a hatred of coffee, while she sipped another latte.

‘So, guys, I’m heading back to Nelson’s Bar now,’ she said, eventually, in between the boys bursting into loud guffaws at every excuse. ‘How about you?’ Beneath the table, she crossed her fingers. ‘Will said you could only stay till Friday, so …?’

Harry’s smile faded. ‘Yeah. Suppose we’d better go back. But we’re not sticking in Nelson’s Bar for long.’ He jutted out his jaw.

‘OK.’ Not her immediate problem. Clancy glanced at the menu for prices and dropped enough money on the table to cover the bill. ‘We’re a bit late, so can we get going?’

The boys clambered unsteadily to their feet and followed her out to where her bright blue BMW shone in the morning sun.

‘OK,’ she said calmly, when she’d set her satnav for the Roundhouse. Nelson’s Bar might not be blessed with a mobile signal or broadband but it had postcodes like anywhere else. ‘Do you want to tell me your plans? Only if you want to, of course.’

From the back seat, Harry gave a noisy yawn. ‘Will let us use his tablet and we looked up the gay community in London online. We got this link about the Bavage Trust, which is for gay young people, and we talked to one of their youth workers, Darren. He was cool. We met him in a café. He gave us booklets.’

Rory took advantage of another of Harry’s yawns to get a word in. ‘He made us feel like we’re not alone. He said he could even sort us out with emergency accommodation in London if we were absolutely dead set on staying. But he thought it would be better to go home to think about our next move. He said some gay teenagers have to leave home when their parents find out but because we’re not in that situation—’

‘Yet!’ Harry chimed in.

‘—we didn’t have to rush into anything.’

‘So we went to this gay bar, one Darren said would be OK,’ Harry put in wonderingly. ‘It was awesome.’

‘Oh?’ Clancy had to keep some of her attention on the road because of the stop-start London traffic and proliferation of roundabouts, but she could see the lads in the back seat via the rear-view mirror. Harry’s head was on Rory’s shoulder and his eyes were closing. ‘What made it awesome?’

Harry yawned again. ‘Because we could hold hands. We could be together, like we want. We got talking to these kids who were exactly like us last year – one going to uni and the other not. The one going to uni got settled in halls then just moved his boyfriend in too. Nobody checks. So that’s what we’re gonna do. I don’t know what we were obsessing about. I’ll go, Rory will follow, and he’ll get a job in Leicester. Darren’s given us the contact details of the Leicester branch of the John Bavage Trust. We’re sorted.’