‘I’m mad at her,’ Duke admits, as he chomps down on it. A couple of coffees and a bit of bad flirting is what it has taken him to relax and start talking properly. Evie receives the compliment of it. ‘Because she’s chosen to sort herself out, and so breakfast was nice. She didn’t even expect me to pay – I can’t tell you the last time somebody close to me has picked up the tab.’

‘Lunch at craft service is on me, then,’ Evie says, and he rolls his eyes.

‘May I continue?’

‘I insist. Sorry. I’m still trying to figure out what emotional wavelength we’re tuned in to today.’

‘You and me both. Christ,’ Duke says, and then: ‘The thing, I’m sat there, a grown man and his mother, and I’m listening to her saying all the things I’ve ever wanted her to say. All of them! And then I think, half my life is already over, and she only just shows up to it now? She’s my mother, for God’s sake. She shouldn’t be showing up at the bloody half-time show – she doesn’t get to have been so bloody absent and then change her ways right when it suits her. Which isn’t kind, or forgiving, but it’s like the thirty-seven-year-old in me can feel one way, and then there’s a five-year-old boy who watched telly on his own on his birthday, and a fifteen-year-old who had to put her to bed after she’d wet herself on the sofa – the list goes on, and on – and for them, I want to flip a table and scream and scream and scream. How dare she, you know? How dare she?’

He delivers this as one big long speech, like it’s all been in his head, building and building, and Evie’s asking means he’s finally got somewhere to put it.

‘I know,’ Evie says, shaking her head. ‘No kid should have to do those things, Duke. You know that, don’t you?’

He doesn’t say anything.

‘And you know it isn’t your fault, right? She’s got a disease, Duke. It’s no more your fault she’s an alcoholic than it would be if she got cancer.’

He shakes his head. ‘I just don’t believe that, you see,’ he says. ‘Because when I think about having a family, when I imagine my own children, whenever that might be, I do not believe that for one second I would let anything come in the way of that. She chose a bottle over me so many times, and I don’t care if she’s sick—’ he says sick like it’s in inverted commas ‘—she never even tried. And this morning we talked, and we hugged, and then I walked away and felt like I wanted to …’