“How did you guess?”

“Sixth sense.”

Melanie crossed the living room and gave Bridge a lingering hug. “I’m so sorry, babe,” she said. “We’ll get this sorted out, you’ll see.”

“I think”—Bridge relaxed into the hug—“I think we have to sort it out by going to Harrow?”

Priya gave a long-suffering sigh. “Fine. Get in my truck. Someday, one of you bastards is going to have to buy a car.”

We all dashed outside to the truck and piled in like clowns in reverse, only to immediately have to pile out again because James Royce-Royce needed to fit a car seat. Or at least transform his stroller into a car seat. Because obviously the James Royce-Royces hadn’t just bought a stroller. They’d brought a multifunctional infant transportation device that looked like a spaceship. It was a weird folding contraption with wheels and a pod and a kind of padded area that you could tuck a baby into like Superman being blasted off from Krypton. There was a lot of clunking and a lot of moving parts that didn’t seem to be moving quite right and a loud yelp as James Royce-Royce closed his finger in something that really wasn’t designed to have fingers closed in it.

“Perhaps,” Priya suggested, “it’d be easier if you didn’t have a baby strapped to your chest?”

“No.” James Royce-Royce flapped his injured hand. “No, I can do this. It’s just we’ve never used the car-seat function because we’re normally walking or taking the Tube.”

Bridge came forward helpfully-slash-hurryingly. “Let me take him.”

With the kind of reluctance you only see amongst new parents and people struggling to kick serious addictions, James Royce-Royce unbuckled Baby J from his chest and handed him over to Bridge. “Support the head, support the head.”

“Oh, come on, even I know that,” I said. “And I’m the last person you should ever trust with a baby.”

Bridge was already bouncing Baby J in that instinctively calming way that some people have and I definitely didn’t. “But Luc, you and Oliver would make such sweet parents.”

“Would we? He works all the time, and I’ve never had a goldfish last more than two days.”

“Babies aren’t goldfish,” insisted Bridge.

“I just know I’d, I don’t know, forget to feed it or leave it on the bus or something.”

James Royce-Royce looked up from the impossibly complex mechanism from which a car seat was meant to emerge. “That’s hard to do. They make quite a lot of noise.” Something clicked, and a pair of wheels popped down. “Oh, that wasn’t supposed to happen. James usually does this.”

“Shift over,” Priya elbowed James Royce-Royce out the way, pushed down on a button, yanked on a lever, and collapsed the shuttle-racer-pod machine into a little tilted basket that looked unmistakably car-seaty. “How do you even survive?”