I’d mostly meant that we should prioritise helping Bridge because she was the one having a crisis, but now everyone was staring at me like I’d taken the last After Eight mint without even apologising. “Luc,” said Bridget, definitely not crying now. “That’s an awful thing to say.”

“It’s your fiancé we’re looking for,” I pointed out.

“But not without Baby J.” Bridget sat back with her arms folded. “He’s part of the group now.”

“I just thought it would be more efficient if we—”

James Royce-Royce glared at me. “If we what? Left my child alone in an empty flat with a kitchen knife and a box of matches? Or am I not welcome amongst you now that I’m a father?”

“Of course you’re welcome, James,” I tried, “I just… It’s only—”

The truck lurched into gear and Priya eased us out into the road. “Drop it, Luc. You sound like a prick.”

I dropped it. Because if Priya was telling you that you sounded like a prick, it meant you’d gone way over the prick line.

The magic of everyone being slightly angry at me got us back into an old groove as we bombed—well, not quite bombed, more travelled at a responsible child-transporting speed—along the north circular. And while I freely admitted that it had been insensitive of me to suggest that having a child made James Royce-Royce a bigger liability friend-wise than, say, me, there’s no getting away from the fact that if you’d rated our emergency marriage rescuing out of ten, we were pulling somewhere between a four and a two. I mean, Bridge had stopped crying so we probably got a point for that. And if there were points for effort, we got at least one of those. But in terms of what we were actually achieving, we…sort of weren’t.

We arrived in Harrow about an hour after we needed to, which meant that even if Tom and his mystery woman had been out getting lunch, they’d have been able to eat, have coffee, tip the waiter, and slink back to their love nest before we’d even parked. This left us sitting outside a random café, with Bridge once again on the verge of tears, not really sure what to do next.

“What should we do next?” I asked, hoping to keep the action ball rolling so no one had to have emotions.

Bridge threw her hands in the air. “I accept that love is for everyone else in the universe except me, so I’m going to die alone surrounded by cats, even though I don’t like cats. And I’ll only be found when the juices from my lonely, suppurating corpse leak through onto the married couple below me while they’re having a beautiful Sunday dinner with their children.”

So score zero for the action ball, then.