Dad rears back slightly. ‘OK, we can fix this, slow down.’

‘We can’t fix it. I want to see her but she might not want to see me, I could make everything even worse.’

‘Flowers,’ he says. ‘Flowers fix most things.’ He walks into the hall and calls up the stairs. ‘Lynette! We need you for grandmotherly duties.’

Before I can argue, Dad’s bustling me into his 4x4 and heading towards Seven Dials. He stops outside the florist. ‘What do you want to say? Get well soon? Sorry? I love you?’ He laughs at the last comment.

‘I don’t want balloons.’

He shakes his head. ‘No, the florist can tailor what she puts in the bouquets depending on the message you want to get across.’

I wonder how many ‘it was fun while it lasted’ bunches he’s sent to his mistresses over the years. ‘I want her to know she means a lot to me, and I’m sorry.’

‘Right. Won’t be a tic.’

He disappears into the shop. Is my dad’s crap example the reason I’ve messed up so badly with women? No. I take all the blame for this fuck-up myself.

He emerges from the shop with an arrangement bigger than his head. No balloon, at least. There isn’t one for ‘Sorry you’re ill and I am such a loser’.

‘Bloody hell, Dad, how much did that cost?’

‘Money’s no object for the woman who saved your life, right?’ He gets into the car and hands the bunch to me. There are roses and tulips and lily of the valley. The scent of the flowers is so intense that they don’t seem real.

‘Do you know what’s happened to her?’

‘No. Just a brief text from her fiancé, Tim. You remember? The one who was there at the same time.’

‘The nerdy one? Surprised they’re getting hitched. I always thought she had more about her. Didn’t you two have a thing for a while?’

I shrug. ‘Nothing serious.’

‘When did you last see her?’ Dad asks.

‘A year or so ago. We’ve mostly lost touch because . . .’ I don’t know how to finish the sentence. Because I was a coward who wasn’t good enough for her.

‘You know, J, you can’t blame yourself for getting it wrong, sometimes.’

I can’t see his expression through the flowers.

‘After the thing happened . . .’ Dad has never been comfortable with the term cardiac arrest, unlike Mum who has revelled in the whole my son was dead for eighteen minutes business. ‘You were different. I don’t know if you were even that aware of it yourself, but I looked it up. When your brain has been deprived of oxygen, it’s a bit like after someone’s had a head injury.’

‘I was a monster,’ I say, quietly.