Another visitor to the study, my brother this time. I rolled my eyes. What I wouldn’t give for just five minutes’ peace. I’d already popped two paracetamol to tackle the pounding headache I now had. I swear it felt like someone were trying to drive a stake through my head.

‘What is it, Tom?’

‘I want to talk to you, but I need you in a calm, steady frame of mind,’ he said.

‘You have so picked the wrong night then,’ I told him straight.

Though my brother was twenty, his wide-eyed, innocent grey eyes and gelled sandy-brown hair made him look at least five years younger. He was lean, verging on skinny. The taupe chinos he wore hung low on his hips and his black shirt was at least a size too big, as if he thought wearing a big shirt would fool people into believing he was larger than he actually was. He was so young.

‘Dan, have you changed your mind about me coming to work for you?’

Oh Lord, not this again.

‘No, I haven’t, Tom. Now, if you don’t mind—’

‘I’d be more use helping you run things than stuck at university, studying for a useless degree,’ my brother insisted.

I sighed. How many more times were we destined to have this same conversation?

‘Tom, you will drop out of university over my dead body and not before.’

‘That’s not fair. It’s my life. Stop treating me like a kid—’

‘Then stop acting like one,’ I snapped. ‘A degree will open doors for you that I can’t. No one will be able to look down on you with a decent education under your belt.’

‘You didn’t get a degree and no one looks down on you,’ said my brother.

How wrong he was.

‘Dan, you’re rich and you have loads of people working for you, and you don’t have to take shit from anyone,’ said Tom.

‘And I have very few real friends and have to constantly watch my back,’ I told him. ‘I’m also very unlikely to die of old age.’

‘You have power—’

I sighed. My brother just couldn’t hear me. All he could see were the bespoke suits and the plush apartments and those who asked how high when I told them to jump. The view from the outside was always sunnier than the view from the middle.

‘Tom, what I have isn’t life. Not a real life. I’m doing this for your own good. One day, with a good education under your belt, you’ll thank me—’

‘My entire arse!’ said Tom. ‘I could have fifty PhDs and that still wouldn’t stop some Crosses from looking at me and seeing nothing but a blanker.’