A thin ray of light from the street elbowed its way through the curtains of the Caramel Suite and in the red glow of the digital clock by the bedside table I could see the outline of Norman’s face on the pillow. His mouth hung open a little and he looked like he was about to say something.

I lay there and stared at his face for a long, long time, examining every part of it from top to bottom, then bottom to top. Left to right, then right to left. I squinted and closed one eye until the two sides of his face became far from symmetrical, then I did the same with the other eye. When he was unmasked and down the rabbit hole of sleep, I knew every inch of that face, committed to memory by the countless hours I’d done just this over the years, marveling that such a perfect human had anything to do with me. But now I was searching for something else. Perhaps a sign of Tony on the off chance a stray sperm might have slipped through before abandoning ship? Something of Adam? Dan McLachlan, who didn’t want to know? James Knox, who I wasn’t going to call?

I couldn’t see any of them. I found me, I found my father, and in the sliver of streetlight in the early hours of the morning I caught a fleeting glimpse of my mum. But, somewhat reassuringly, there really wasn’t a sign of anybody else, and so I thought, well, maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s true that Norman really is totally and only mine. Maybe all those years ago the universe decided that Sadie Foreman had tried enough and cried enough and was done looking in all the wrong places. So here you go, here’s someone just for you. You did this. And he’s perfect. Well done, love.

By 4:04 a.m., in a fug of sleeplessness, antacid overload and nagging stomach pain, I came to the conclusion that I’d been absolutely right all along and there really was no need for the search for Norman’s other parent to continue. Then, at 4:05 I remembered that it hadn’t been my idea to look for him in the first place, it had been Norman’s. So there went that.

Somewhere in the longest, noisiest and most sleep-deprived night of my life, I must have dropped off, though, because the next thing I knew I was being shaken none too gently awake. Norman’s pink-and-white splotchy face loomed large and in living color an inch from my nose as the Edinburgh sun jostled through the window behind him.

“Mum, Mum, wake up. Leonard’s gone.”

39

LEONARD WAS INDEED GONE. Although his overnight bag was exactly where he’d placed it the night before, his coat was hung neatly over the back of a chair and his laptop was sitting on the window-seat bed. At Norman’s insistence, we searched the house, which was just as empty in the light of day as it was the previous night, but we couldn’t find hide nor wispy gray hair of him. We did find the kitchen, though, so for a moment I had high hopes for a cup of tea, but the chances of finding a stray tea bag within a decade of its use-by date didn’t look promising.