“It was like...like maybe if I...oh, Leonard, I don’t know. It just felt like it was the only way I could find to dilute all that anger and grief into something almost tolerable, you know?” I was actually quite surprised by the eloquence of my own explanation.

Leonard inclined his head slightly in acknowledgment, but if I’d been looking for judgment, and maybe I had, I clearly wasn’t going to get it.

“Top up, my dear?”

With a full cup, I told Leonard how, all those months later when I came out the other side of my madness and brought my prize home from the hospital, I looked down at Norman’s perfect baby face and swore I’d never fail him like my father had failed me.

“And the truth is, Leonard, I’ve probably done nothing but fail him spectacularly ever since.”

My lame attempt at an ironic laugh came dangerously close to being something else. Because I knew it was true. Keep calm and drink tea.

I told Leonard how when Norman was six he’d come home from school excited about his day for just about the first time ever. Tripping over his words to tell me about the naughty new boy from London, instead of trying to hide another bruised shin under his pulled-up socks, or clumsily taping up a rip in his shirt and hoping I wouldn’t notice.

Then because Leonard was still listening I told him about Jax and Norman’s Five-Year Plan, and how I’d really and truly believed in it because Jax was laugh-out-loud, close-one-eye, try-not-to-look-at-the-car-crash funny and Norman has gravitas. And how seeing those two boys together somehow made me better than I’d ever been.

And then, because, right at that moment it didn’t feel like I could stop talking even if I wanted to, I told him how Josie Fenton had called me at six o’clock on a warm summer’s morning after she’d found her son cold and blue in his blue pajamas. Wedged so hard against his bedroom door that she’d had to shove with her whole body weight to get it open, which meant that even though we’d never know for sure, maybe Jax had nearly made it. And how I sat on the floor outside my own son’s bedroom door for an entire hour before I crept in to wake him with a kiss and blow his world apart. How now all that was left of a best friend was a hole in a wall. And then, because it was eight forty-five and I was running out of time, I told Leonard about Norman’s new plan.

“I know it’s only four weeks until the Edinburgh Fringe, and I’m probably going to have to read every phone book in Britain from cover to cover, and there’s actually quite a bit less than a snowflake’s chance in hell that I’m going to be able to deliver either of the big-ticket items on that plan, but by hell or high water, Leonard, I’m going to try.”