I fiddled for another frantic minute, dismissing idea after idea. Then, at last, the answer became clear. As with all good puzzles, once you saw the solution, you realised it couldn’t be any other way. I tipped the puzzle upside down, and bent the wire just enough that two loops fit through one hole. Then I slid the wooden piece the entire way around, and watched as it came loose, just like a magic trick.

I brandished the piece at my future parents. Love me, I thought. Please.

But they weren’t impressed. Their eyes were wide with alarm. Clutching the puzzle like a weapon, red-faced and sweating, I must have looked obsessive. Maybe dangerous.

‘Perhaps you’d like to take Timothy out for a hot chocolate?’ Mrs Radfield suggested. ‘There’s a lovely little cafe just—’

‘Maybe another time,’ Lillian said. She worked in law enforcement. She had probably seen dangerous obsessives before.

They were leaving. My stomach churned. ‘How about tomorrow? We could—’

‘Tomorrow’s not good for us,’ Bob said, picking up on his wife’s unease. ‘Some other time.’

Mrs Radfield shot me a glare—You fucked up again!—and then led them to the door.

‘Nice to meet you, Timothy,’ Lillian lied, as they walked out.

As soon as they were gone, I pressed my ear to the door. Maybe I would hear them saying that they secretly liked me. Or that they might come back to see me in a different setting.

Instead, I heard Bob say, ‘We’re still thinking. In fact, we were wondering if a daughter might suit us better.’

A few days later, Thistle was gone. She even got to keep her name.

Mrs Radfield didn’t hit me in the end. But I agonised for weeks, convincing myself that Bob and Lillian had been the perfect parents—rich, smart, kind—and I had screwed up my chance.

Now I’m looking up at Biggs’s apartment building. Modern, with four storeys of polished glass. A doorman. Probably a pool on the roof and a gym somewhere inside. A roller shutter protects the underground parking lot, but there are a few empty visitor spaces out front. It’s the sort of place the wealthy live if they’re afraid of the poor. If an uprising happens, they’re ready to wait it out in style.

It’s exactly the sort of place I used to imagine Bob and Lillian lived in.

‘How are your folks?’ I ask Thistle. ‘Bob and Lillian?’

‘I don’t talk to them much,’ Thistle says. ‘My divorce pissed them off.’ She looks at me. ‘How did you know their names?’

‘They almost adopted me.’

‘Really? Jesus, that’s weird to think about.’

‘A Sliding Doors moment,’ I say.

‘We were nearly siblings.’

‘Or I was nearly you.’

She gives me a withering look, as if I couldn’t possibly have been her.