There was a long silence. Then Oliver came and sat next to me. “Frankly, Lucien, it will make me feel miserable. I’m still very much working through what my relationship with my father was or meant, and so putting it into a neat little box and tying that box with a neat little bow and attaching a neat little label that says ‘Beloved husband, devoted father’ is…” He broke off and then finished in a resentful rush. “Fucking with my head.”

“It would,” I told him. “It’s a heady-fucky thing to have to do. Which is why I’m telling you, one last time, if you want to nope out, you can.”

“But—”

“No buts.” I produced the assertive finger and waved it in the air. “Blah blah family blah blah expectation. Even with all that, if this is bad for you, that’s the most important thing.”

Oliver heaved a sigh packed with so many different emotions that if I’d wanted to, I could have sorted them alphabetically, starting with angry and ending with woeful. “I’m sorry, Lucien. I wish I could be that brave or that selfish but, ironically, it’s not how I was raised. And I’m working on that, but my father was inconsiderate enough to die in the middle of the process rather than at the end of it. So here I am, doing what is expected of me, because right here and now right, I cannot imagine doing anything else.”

“And,” I said, squeezing his hand tightly, “I support you a hundred percent.” I didn’t say, even if you don’t support yourself because that wasn’t what he needed to hear. Besides, coming from me, it would have been kind of hypocritical.

“If you supported me a hundred percent”—Oliver’s lips twitched—“you wouldn’t be wearing the same suit to my father’s funeral that you wore to your coworker’s wedding.”

I did, in fact, have exactly one suit, not counting the blue one I’d rented for Bridge’s blue-and-rose-gold marital extravaganza. “It’s a multipurpose item. It’s both frugal and ethical.” Standing, I gave Oliver my most morally superior face. “Do you know how many litres of drinkable water go into producing a pair of formal trousers?”

“No,” said Oliver, looking—as I should have predicted—genuinely curious. “How many?”

“Well, I don’t know either. But I bet it’s a lot.” And that was about as far as my cheer-up-Oliver routine could run because if we didn’t leave soon, we’d be late.

Or at least not early enough to satisfy the ghost of David Blackwood.