About thirty seconds after I pressed the send button a beep came back on my phone. At exactly the same time I felt a sharp, reverberating jolt and my head shot up in time to take in the view as the little car veered onto the side of the road, with two wheels bumping noisily along on the grass.

“Jesus! Leonard! What...?”

I just had time to register a glimpse of a very strange look on Leonard’s face before he swung the steering wheel violently and heaved us back onto the road, overcorrecting to the wrong side as a delivery van came hurtling around the corner.

Before the scream in my throat was able to even form properly Leonard let out a startled “Hell’s bells, man!” as he swung the wheel back the other way and, out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of Norman’s feet whip up off the floor and curl beneath him in a semifetal position. Within a split second the van was gone and we were back on the right side of the road, albeit at a greatly reduced speed and with a very, very shaken-looking driver at the wheel. Leonard’s face was ashen.

“Oh dear, oh dear, dear me. I’m...is...is everyone okay? I’m so sorry, I don’t know... I didn’t... I...”

To be honest, I felt as bad as he looked, but suddenly Norman was leaning forward from the back seat patting our arms reassuringly in tandem and looking from one to the other.

“It’s okay, Leonard. Honest. It’s okay. We’re okay. We’re all okay. Aren’t we, Mum?” Are we?

“Yes, yes of course we are. Perfectly fine, Leonard, it’s...don’t worry about it.” But what the hell just happened?

“I... I just don’t know what happened. One minute I was on the road and the next I... I must have lost concentration for just an instant. I... It’s absolutely unforgivable. I’m so sorry.”

Norman wriggled even farther forward. “It’s not unforgivable, Leonard. Honest! I reckon we would have been a goner if it wasn’t for your great driving. We forgive you. Don’t we, Mum?” Ah, it’s so nice to be nice.

“Of course we do, Leonard. But I do think that maybe it’d be a good idea to pull over at the next stop just to...regroup. All of us. What do you think?”

While Leonard had regained some of his composure, thanks to Norman, he looked as relieved as me when, just a few minutes later, we were able to pull off the motorway at a large rest stop. Norman wandered off to find a loo and Leonard went inside to buy us some very much-needed tea.

I looked down at my phone in my lap, which was still blinking with the new message that had come through just before our near-death experience. But it had been too quick, surely? Unless Adam Linley really had been waiting around for a text from me for thirteen years and was going to be as happy as Tony had been to see me. Or perhaps it was from his wife, telling me to leave him alone and how dare I. Or maybe he was in the Dan McLachlan camp and the reply was just “not interested.” Maybe not even prefaced with a sorry.