He wouldn’t have given Carole King the time of day when he was eighteen. But what a lovely track Ali had sent, what a masterclass in deceptive simplicity; he’d listened to it on the train and been blindsided by the emotional tug of her lyrics on his cynical, heard-it-all heart, because it was Ali Connor, Alison, that long-lost girl, speaking to him through this song, like solace for a pain he hadn’t known he had. Jesus, he’d thought; this was crazy. This was bad. In a good, good way. He’d listened three times to the track, wrung out from it every possible shade and nuance, then responded by sending M. Ward’s cover of ‘Let’s Dance’, for the mesmerising poetry of those reinvented Bowie lyrics and – there was no escaping the truth of this – the stripped-back, aching desire. She was ten thousand miles away; where was the harm?

After he’d sent it, he listened to nothing at all, and found he couldn’t write either, or read. Katelin had rung, and they talked about Christmas, his family, who would sleep where, what they would eat, an easy conversation about the real world. But he wanted to talk to Alison Connor. He wanted his phone to ring again, and it be her.

He’d stared blindly at the landscape as the train carved a path north, and let his thoughts travel to Sheffield in the bleak, black summer of 1979, and to what happened that night in July, and what he might have done differently. He thought about Duncan, and his misguided fling, unrelated and incomparable in Dan’s mind to his own feelings for Alison. He thought about Katelin, her brittle, implacable sense of right and wrong, and he thought about love in its many guises, and about loyalty, and trust. But time and again his thoughts swept back to Alison Connor, and where this was all leading, and whether he could see her again, and if so, how, and how soon. These songs were incredible, each new track the highlight of his day; but he wanted to talk to her, and he wanted to hold her again; that was all.

Late December, two days before Christmas. Alex had colonised the living room, dragged the sofa into a front-and-centre location, reconnected the Xbox to the television and was doggedly taking Sheffield Wednesday through a sensational season in the Championship, towards the play-offs and promotion. FIFA, Career Mode: a taste of power and glory for the bruised and bloodied fans of a team under siege in the real world. This was Alex’s antidote to the rigours of Plato, Kant and Nietzsche at Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Owls had never had a manager as wise, steadfast and inspiring as Alexander Lawrence. There was a well-known game hack, available via a two-second Google search, to secure an unlimited budget for the transfer windows, but Alex refused to cheat. Instead, he slogged away with the funds he was allocated, growing his squad and bringing talented youth players up through the ranks. His dad was proud of him. A steady hand on the tiller, some home-grown talent, a few canny purchases from unlikely sources, and result after result that proved you couldn’t just buy success in football, you had to nurture it. This is what Dan had just said to Katelin, after she’d complained that the boy had sat on his arse and wasted two days in the front room with the curtains closed.