‘Since when have you been into adventure sports?’

I do smile now. ‘Fair point.’ I line up the ball, but the wind blows it along the perishing green felt.

‘Gem, if you’re not sure the timing’s right, you could wait a month or two,’ Dad says. ‘No harm postponing for a bit.’

‘Did Mum tell you to say that?’ She’s never been completely onside with the embryo transfer. Andrew’s mother, Isabel, is the only person who supported the idea 100 per cent.

‘No.’ But he won’t look at me.

‘Tell the truth, Dad.’

‘Perhaps she was hoping you might meet someone while you were taking a break from the treatment.’

From nowhere, the blood rushes to my head again. ‘Oh yeah, and get knocked up the normal way? She’d rather I had a baby from a one-night stand than with someone I love?’

‘Loved,’ my dad says gently.

‘Love,’ I insist. ‘Just because he’s not here any more doesn’t mean I love him any less.’

We move to the next hole: a rusty barrel. We never, ever get the ball inside and always run out of patience and end up cheating.

‘It’s hard for her to understand, I guess. I’m the same. I think – we think – that Andrew would have wanted you to meet someone else.’

‘No. What Andrew wanted was to stay healthy and to have a family with me. Do you and Mum think I want this? Knowing that, if I beat the odds and it works, our kid won’t meet the man who would have been the best dad ever?’ The little flame that’s been burning since I met Casey on Monday, and learned how she’d been ignored by her father, erupts into a full-blown inferno, and letting it out is like breathing fire. ‘And yet the world’s full of stupid, selfish men – and women too, but mainly men – who have children without giving a toss. Who don’t realize what an incredible thing it is to make a new human, to be with them as they grow up.’

I am not thinking of men, I am thinking of one man. Of Dan, the man with the beautiful face and the hypnotic eyes, and the morals of a shitbag. The man I thought I recognized because I’d remembered the sad eyes of his daughter on the first day of cancer treatment. The man I went out of my way to help.

The man who kept me awake last night as I worked out what I’d have said to him if I had guessed who he was and what he’d done.

‘Sweetheart—’ Dad says, but I don’t want to hear it.

I whack the ball with my putter and, by some fluke, it goes right into the hole in the barrel.

‘Storming shot, Gemma. You need to let rip more often, it’s good for your game.’ He tries the shot and misses spectacularly. As he picks up the ball to try again, he speaks softly. ‘Not all men are terrible. And we want you to meet one of the good ones, whatever happens with the treatment.’