Either way, the choice was not his to make, because on one of their famous breaks, Abbott had a one-night stand with a girl called Fiona. There had been an unfortunate contraception malfunction and from that moment on, fate was in the driving seat.

He did the decent thing. He stuck by Fiona, married her, fathered Nathan and loved that boy with all his heart. But although Fiona was a good woman – as canny with money as he was crap with it, a great mother, funny, witty, great-looking, and a tiger in bed – she had one drawback. She was not Tess.

Abbott had joined the military. Being in the Marines changed him more profoundly than any other event in his life, excluding, perhaps, the birth of Nathan. The military taught him to both read and control his instincts. It instilled in him discipline and organisation.

At home, however, things were not so good. The word ‘divorce’ was mentioned. Who had said it first? He couldn’t remember. The point being that it was out there, and once it’s out there, as soon as the concept takes breath, it’s difficult to go back. Talk of separation and divorce, once taboo and either whispered or spoken of only in anger, now became commonplace, something they discussed as easily as who did the washing-up.

Until, by a slow process of osmosis, it became a reality.

There was no rancour, at first. They had agreed between themselves to keep things civil for the sake of the young Nathan. He was just ten years old when they finally went their separate ways. Abbott had been away for so long that although he absolutely doted on Nathan, he hardly knew him. But it was as though the separation wrenched something loose in Abbott, or maybe tightened it up, for suddenly he became a much more present father, taking every opportunity he could to see his son. This, though undoubtedly a good thing, came at the expense of his previous good relations with Fi, who was aghast at the change, unstinting in her contempt for Abbott’s ‘sudden change of heart’, as she put it. He, meanwhile, felt the same when Fiona had so quickly moved on to another bloke, a guy who held an administrative role attached to the British Army’s Intelligence Corps.

And in the background – something that was like a low hum in his head whatever the drama and tragedy of his life – were thoughts of Tess.

Years passed, until the advent of the internet allowed him to look her up and he’d discovered that Tess was now married with two kids and worked as a lawyer at Fitzpatrick & Sims. They’d got in touch, met up, and during the subsequent meal he’d told her the story of how Chris had died.