I carefully sipped my lemonade and set my glass down on the bar.

‘I take it you don’t get on,’ the piano player said.

‘I don’t really know whether we get on or not,’ I said. ‘I’ve only known my dad for a couple of months.’ There, I’d done it. I’d called Mark my dad, though not when he was there to hear. ‘That scene in here a couple of nights ago? That was when he told me he was my father.’

So this was the point of hanging out in bars. Maybe this was why Sean liked it. You said things that mattered to you, things that you would have thought were impossible to say to anyone.

There was a long pause, so long that I thought maybe he hadn’t taken in what I’d just told him. Eventually he said, ‘So that’s what’s been going on. I thought he looked like he felt bad about something.’

‘I guess he did.’

It was reassuring to picture the scene as he must have perceived it. It turned it into something that could be reviewed and picked over for little nuggets of insight or truth, the way you might analyse a set text in an English literature exam.

The barman broke off from drying glasses and took us in with an expression that was disconcerted and resigned and impressed all at once, a mixture of is that really happening? and so that’s the way the wind’s blowing.

I said, ‘What did you think was going on?’

He shrugged. ‘I didn’t really try to figure it out. I just thought, What a beautiful girl.’

That was all it took: that little affirmation, that little compliment, as sweet and heady as Armagnac sucked off a sugar cube.

It was a rush I hadn’t realised I’d been craving. He’d noticed me, and I wanted him to notice me more. More than that, I wanted him to like me. I needed him to like me. I was new to this, but I knew what it meant anyway, and I didn’t care what I might need to do to make it happen.

By the time I went back upstairs I had his name and number in my phone. He was called Jake Hillerman: a name I could already imagine myself doodling, then destroying all evidence of. Ellie didn’t stir as I let myself into our room, and as soon as I got into bed I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

A few weeks later, on the free day between my final Maths paper and my first History exam, I lied to my mother, caught the train into central London and met him at the Barbican.

I wore a dress that I’d taken with me in my schoolbag, and changed into in the ladies’ at Waterloo station. I’d agonised about what to wear; I wanted to look sophisticated – I didn’t want him to be put off by how young I was.

He hadn’t asked my age, and I hadn’t told him. I assumed he thought I was older than I was, and I didn’t want to put him off. I soon realised I needn’t have worried. He complimented me on the way I looked, but it was obvious even to me that he wasn’t really interested in my clothes.