No kidding. “I’m sure.”

He looks me over again then sighs in a your funeral kind of way. “Well, you have to look at the push and pull factors. For example, were your parents happy in their marriage—”

“Were they?”

“Not especially.” His words are blunt but delivered mildly. “But not specifically unhappy, either.” He pauses for a moment, checking my reaction, then evidently decides it’s safe to continue. “Your dad was a friend of mine; we would run together. I cannae do it now that my knee isn’t what it was . . . We even did a couple of half marathons together.” I’m looking at him in frank astonishment. I can imagine Glen running—he has a spare efficiency to his wiry frame—but I didn’t know my father had been a runner. Perhaps still is a runner, somewhere. “We’d have a pint and a blether from time to time and the idea just came from there. We were training for the Glasgow marathon when he disappeared.”

“Did you do it without him?”

He shakes his head. “It wouldnae have been the same.” I nod. It seems respectful that he didn’t do it, like he was acknowledging the importance of what had happened. Life can’t just go on regardless. It shouldn’t. “So what I’m saying is I ken what I’m talking about, and not just from the professional side. He wasnae having an affair or anything, if that’s what you’re thinking.” He’s looking at me sternly now, like a school teacher belaboring the point. But I don’t feel the slightest bit ashamed: of course I’ve considered that. I even wondered in my more adventurous period whether promiscuity could be an inherited trait. “We never found any evidence of that. They had their moments, your mum and dad, but that’s marriage.” He shrugs. “You ken how it is.”

I don’t, actually. Quite apart from not being in a marriage, I rather doubt that my relationship with Jonathan is typical. On top of which my parents were hardly a good example, and I could never quite understand the dynamic between Pete and my mother. “What caused their particular moments?” A furnace of the soul: perhaps my parents’ love was more the incinerator type. Perhaps it had already burned itself out by then.