I think he thought it would be something nice for Mum and me to have in common, but good exam results were not the thing I was concerned about sharing with her.

When I applied, Hannah and I had broken up very recently, so putting the Irish Sea between us seemed like a good idea at the time. Fast forward to June, and the increasingly real prospect of leaving Mum behind was giving me second thoughts. Actually, I was having second thoughts about the whole university malarkey altogether. But I couldn’t tell Dad that. He’d flip his lid.

“We don’t have champagne flutes,” he said when I walked into the kitchen. He frowned at the mugs on the mug tree.

“The banana one or the stripy one?”

Our kitchen was bright and cozy with a wonky spice rack on the wall and clutter on every surface, cookbooks with the pages stuck together with sauce, and crooked wooden cabinets that Granddad built because when we moved in here, we didn’t have money for things like redoing the kitchen. Dad was no cook, though, so these days the spices were clumping together and there was dust collecting on the recipe books.

“The stripy one,” I said.

“Right.” He beamed and ran one hand through his hair, wavy and still black even though he was nearly forty-five. In the exact moment of noticing it, I realized he must dye it. “So, history today, wasn’t it? Was it what you hoped for? Bernadette Devlin and Bismarck?”

“Yeah, I really don’t want to dissect it. I’m fried.”

“All right, all right. Let’s toast instead. We have a lot to celebrate.”

I squeezed the cork out of the bottle with a satisfying pop!

I had a lot to celebrate, technically. The last year of school had been hell topped off with the Leaving Cert, but it was over now and I would never have to go back there again. Dad, on the other hand, would not have realized my exams were over if the schedule hadn’t been posted to the fridge for the last nine months. Ironically he was always the one with the scatty memory.

“Your exams are over,” he announced, holding his mug aloft, “and you’re going to Oxford—”

“We don’t know that,” I said quickly, my stomach churning.

“I’m certain of it. You’ll have the time of your life.” He hesitated then, and I could tell he was ramping up to something else. Suddenly, I knew what it was and my stomach did a giddy flip.