When we were growing up, Dad wasn’t around very much. I’d never really thought about it until Mum’s changing-room confessional because, at the time, it didn’t seem that strange. I knew everything about my friends’ mums but I knew next to nothing about anyone’s dad. Some mums worked, some mums didn’t, but all of them took the lead with their kids. Dads went to work, dads came home and dads were, for the most part, not to be disturbed. Mums were there to answer questions and help with projects while dads were tired and only available to drive you to the ice rink on Saturdays if they really had to. When my mum was told she’d have to have a caesarean with Jo, I vividly recalled a long and involved debate between my parents as to whether or not I’d have to go and live with my nan for a few weeks, since Mum would be unable to take care of me. I’d made a very vocal case at the time, about how I was fourteen and hardly needed a babysitter, but that was how hands-off my dad was. Sure, he was occasionally around to crack a joke, give a girl a piggyback or destroy my burgeoning sense of self with a casual comment about how my Doc Martens would make all the boys think I was a lesbian, but we really didn’t know each other that well.

But I was tenacious and, apparently, a miracle worker. If I could get Patrick Parker back in my life, I could get a two-way conversation out of a middle-aged man in Costco on a Sunday morning.

‘Dad?’

‘Rosalind?’

‘How did you know Mum was the one?’

He stopped in the middle of the aisle and pulled his glasses up off his nose, resting them on the top of his head.

‘Any reason in particular you’re asking this right now?’ he asked. ‘Is there something we should know about the young man who sent you those flowers?’

‘No,’ I replied, respecting his attempt to deflect my question. ‘I genuinely want to know.’

‘You’ve heard the story of how we met a thousand times,’ he said, dragging the trolley forwards, and me with it. ‘Now, booze. Do you think just wine and beer or do we need spirits as well?’

‘Spirits as well,’ I replied without hesitation. ‘And I’m not asking how you met, I know that.’ At the chip shop where they argued over the last battered sausage. A love story for the ages. ‘I’m asking how you knew she was the woman you wanted to marry.’

‘Well, it’s just what you did in those days,’ Dad wandered on, plopping his glasses back down on his face to inspect the price of a jug of gin. ‘As soon as your mum got pregnant, I had to propose.’