The only reason I had even been able to recollect his last name is through the stroke of luck that he’d dubbed himself “The Viscount,” after Viscount Linley, Princess Margaret’s son. So when I’d begun to trawl the depths of my memory, greased by the wheels of a couple of Hobnobs, the vision of a long-haired guy in a loincloth and a crown had popped into my head for seemingly no reason at all. But then the name Adam Linley followed in fairly quick succession, along with the flashbacks to the aforementioned dubious behavior. When Leonard’s lineup had presented me with a picture that looked so suspiciously similar to my cloudy recollection that either Adam had discovered the fountain of youth or he was using a very, very old photo on his Facebook profile, even I couldn’t have made a mistake. Voilà.

With Tony and his sperm out of the picture, Adam Linley’s odds were shortening with every mile closer we got to Bournemouth. The more I thought about it, though, the more I started to think that Leonard and I should probably have been a little more thorough with our task. Maybe added a couple of columns for some details about the prospective fathers’ lives as they stood now. Because what about the possibility of wives, families, criminal activities or fame and fortune? To name just a few potential problems.

Not that I’d thought they’d all be sitting around waiting for my call or anything, I guess it just hadn’t entered my mind any earlier that these guys also had thirteen years of life under their belt since I’d last seen them. To me, they were just names on Leonard’s spreadsheet, representing a task I really didn’t want to face but was trying my almost best to, because after all it was the least I could do. And, funnily enough, also the most.

With the deep wisdom of hindsight, I decided to approach Adam Linley a little differently than my previous two attempts, with a text rather than a call—even though I generally wasn’t that big on texting as a rule, possibly because I didn’t have too many people to message. My main text conversations were with Dennis, who usually only texted me when he wanted me to pick him up a coffee on my way back from lunch, and Jax.

I’d tried very hard to ignore the trail of messages that were still attached to Jax’s name in my phone. Norman had a mobile that I’d bought him when he’d started catching the bus to school on his own, but more often than not he left it at home, so Jax used to text me to let me know they were okay. All good, Sadie, or at shop, or getting fishnchips, or me n Normie at beach, more often than not accompanied by a photo of them both doing exactly what it said in the message.

In summer the photos featured Jax bare-chested and bronzed like a mini-Tarzan, and Norman hatted, shirted and covered from head to toe so he didn’t add sunburn to his skin’s other woes. In winter it’d be beanies pulled low, jackets zipped high and, once, a chip jauntily stuck up each of Norman’s nostrils and one coming out of Jax’s ear.