“You are and I am, but”—he cast his bleary eyes over my quite literally burnt offering—“that looks ambiguous.”

I perched myself on the edge of the bed. “Well, you have to eat. But I understand if you don’t want to eat this.”

Pushing himself into a sitting position, he selected the least awful piece of French toast and ate it valiantly. “Actually, out of everything you’ve made me, this is one of the least dreadful. Some bits of it are even quite nice.”

I’d take that. “There’s also coffee,” I said. “Which I’ve definitely not fucked up.”

And for a while we sat in silence, sharing my okay French toast and my genuinely decent coffee. Oliver was looking slightly better than he had last night, which meant he was looking kind of like the zombie version of himself, instead of the ghost version. He was propped against an artful construction of pillows, the duvet drawn to midchest height, picking at his late breakfast/early lunch with visibly increasing energy. At some point in the near future, he might even be standing upright.

“Soooo…” As ways to begin a conversation went, a long so was up there with Hi, have you considered changing your broadband provider? “Do you want to…talk? Or not talk? Or go for a walk? Or stay in bed? Or have me go away? Or—”

“At the moment, I think I’d mostly like you to stop listing things.”

I took a deep breath. “Sorry. How are you?”

“Not so great. My dad died.”

Okay, so that was either a good sign because he had the strength to be sarcastic. Or a bad sign because that’s the answer I would have given and I was a dick. “Stop channelling me, and be serious. You don’t have to confide in me, but this was a big deal and I’m worried about you.”

“I’m sorry to worry you, Lucien. And I will be… I’ll be… Everything will be fine.”

“I know that,” I told him. “But it’s obviously not fine right now. And I know you don’t like feeling…” I tried to express very gently through mime that you aren’t living up to the unrealistic expectations foisted on you by your parents, one of whom is now dead. “But I love you even when you’re…” I’d run out of gentle mimes. “Crap.”

He laughed. “Wonderful pep talk, Lucien. Have you considered volunteering as a bereavement counsellor?”

“I just mean it’s safe to be crap with me. Like I let myself be crap with you literally all the time.”