He had shoved the book back into Atticus’s pocket and pretended to be fascinated by a squirrel. Atticus came whistling over, and plonked himself down next to Dan. Thigh to thigh, arm nudging arm. Dan had wanted to lay his head on Atticus’s shoulder but didn’t. Fitz had barked at the squirrel and it scarpered, but Dan kept staring at the tree in front of him, instead of turning towards Atticus and the kiss he knew would come.

‘Dangerous things, trees. You need to keep an eye on them – they could attack at any second,’ Atticus had said into the silence, and Dan’s heart constricted. My whole life, he thought, has been pledged to this meeting with you.

The squeak of the chair pulls Dan back into the room, into the puzzle the pair of them make.

‘I want to stop needing to count, Atticus,’ Dan says. ‘That’s what I need help with.’

Atticus’s response, which comes after fifteen seconds and seven and a half turns on the chair, is not a confession. ‘It sounds onions.’

Dan sighs and goes along with Atticus’s latest diversion tactic. Realizes, in that second, that he always will and feels failure grow, like bindweed, around his best intentions. ‘Onions?’

‘Yes. Onions. Awful things, evil. If Hitler were a vegetable, he’d be an onion.’

‘You don’t like onions?’ Dan says, slightly incredulous. Inwardly he cradles this small truth that Atticus has given him, like a child clutches a pebble on a beach with a thousand more. This is something, isn’t it, Dan? No, not really, but it’s all you’ve been given.

‘You do?’ Atticus pulls a dramatic face.

‘They’re all right.’ In fact, Dan loves them. He and Fitz often share a packet of Pickled Onion Monster Munch at the weekend. Sometimes Dan, the other Dan, tries to wedge them onto Fitz’s paws, like ornate rings.

‘Well, don’t eat any before I kiss you.’

Atticus says it so casually that Dan thinks he might have misheard him. He wants to ask him to repeat himself but isn’t brave enough. Instead he sits and wonders how the conversation went from Dan’s counting to Sesame Street to onions to kissing. Because this is Atticus, Dan realizes, and this is what he does, and this is why Dan likes him, and doesn’t like him, and is, and is not, desperate for Atticus to kiss him.

‘Have you gone red? You’re adorable.’ Atticus is peering at him. His hair is messy, and his eyes bright, and Dan thinks, I’m not the adorable one.