I sat on the edge of the bed and opened and closed a few folders on the laptop. There was a lot of stuff about candle-making and welding and some notes about Photoshop but I couldn’t find anything that looked like it might have Leonard’s phone number on it. I was about to give up and just go back to worrying when I saw a folder called Sadie. When I clicked on that there was another folder inside called Finding Fathers and when I clicked on that I found the spreadsheet Leonard had made way back when we first decided to come on the trip.

I opened it up and the list of my maybe dads’ names and phone numbers came up. Since the last time I saw it Leonard had added another column called Miscellaneous Contacts, and next to where it said Mr. Big Al was Big Al’s phone number. And when I saw all those phone numbers it gave me a bit of an idea for a contingency plan, which was pretty handy because I didn’t have anything else.

Mum and Jax are both big on contingency plans. Jax says having a backup idea in case everything goes wrong is the first rule of comedy, but Mum says it’s a pretty good rule for life in general. So, like if we’re going over to Falmouth and me and Jax want to go to the library to look up comedy autobiographies while Mum does shopping, we’ll arrange to meet back up at a certain time but we also make a contingency plan. So we’ll maybe say we’ll all meet at the Co-Op at three o’clock, but if anything happens we’ll keep going back there every half hour to check for the others. Stuff like that.

I guess Mum didn’t have time to think of a contingency plan that morning. Like, if I’m not back by six at the latest, Norman, go to the nearest police station and then alert the media. Although maybe not that. But I did realize that calling a responsible adult was probably a pretty good backup plan and that if Mum hadn’t been in such a hurry that’s probably exactly what she would have said to do. And because you’ve got to work with what you’ve got, even though I didn’t have any proof that any of them were actually responsible, what I had was a bunch of phone numbers for quite a few adults, so I decided they’d have to do.

I called Tony’s number first, because I felt like he’d know what to do in a scary situation like this and, if he didn’t, then Kathy definitely would. I thought that was cool, sort of like a backup for my contingency plan, except that Tony’s phone rang a few times and then nobody answered so it went to his voice mail. It was funny to hear his voice again, because even though I’d thought about him quite a lot since we left Swansea, it already seemed like it was ages ago.