In truth, I will carry my punishment with me for the rest of my days. Gramps might be able to forgive me, but I can’t do anything of the sort. They talked a lot about guilt in my therapy sessions. ‘Let go of guilt,’ I’d be told. Try letting go of guilt sometime – see how far it goes. It’s a weight that it’s only right I should live with, and, if a day is allowed to pass without remembering what I once tried to do, it’s an act of disrespect to the lives only saved by chance. And I would have it no other way.

‘Thank you,’ I whisper.

He waves my words away. ‘There’s nothing to be thanking me for.’

The rush-hour traffic slows us again as we reach the hill that leads past the station and down to our estate. We stop a few car lengths short of Bradbury’s News & Tobacco. A giant inflatable Santa lolls above the shopfront.

I don’t want to turn my head, but the pull grows ever stronger. My head remains facing forward, but my eyeballs rotate towards the window. Gramps creeps the car forward a few metres. The draw is too great. I turn to see if I might catch a glimpse of her beyond the glass.

‘She asks after you,’ Gramps says.

‘Who does?’ I snap my neck back round.

He sniggers. ‘The gorgeous girl who works there.’

She must have heard what happened. I daren’t look again, risk her seeing me. I’d be so embarrassed. But I can’t just turn it off. There’s a million pills that can stop you being crazy, but I don’t think they’ve invented one to stop you being crazy about someone – I reckon that’s a different level of madness altogether. I guess that one day she won’t be my first thought on waking, nor my last at night. But that day seems a way off.

‘I think she’s taken a liking to you,’ Gramps adds.

I crumple my face and wait for the cringe to subside. ‘Shut up.’

‘Come on, Ollie. She’s crumpet!’

I laugh at the expression. ‘She’s a nice girl,’ I say.

‘Ask her out.’ He makes such things sound so easy. I can only imagine that his generation lived in a perpetual episode of Happy Days, where boys who liked girls just walked right up to them and asked them for a date. ‘You do like her, don’t you?’

I glance over once more as we roll past. Through the rain-dashed window, I catch sight of Sophia’s profile, reaching for a pack of ciggies behind the till. A pair of furry reindeer antlers poke from her head. She’s beautiful. She’s perfect.

‘I think I’d just like to be able to call her a friend. That’s all. That’d be enough.’