Paul had immediately felt right at home. He remembered Gloria telling him that the youth club received about five hundred kids a week between six and nineteen years old. Paul supervised the sixteen- to nineteen-year-olds and many of them were boys and young men. But there were girls too thought Paul now, his eyes following Simone as she chatted with her friends. He knew that in a few minutes, she would remove her coat and sit down at one of the tables where all the materials were spread out ready for the craft and textiles session. Simone loved designing and making clothes. She’d told him if she had the money, she would have gone on to do a proper design course. But Paul knew so much more about Simone than just her career aspirations.

He knew that like many of her peers at the youth club, she’d had a hard time living at home. She was just four years old when her father left. Her mother didn’t work and they struggled to keep a roof over their heads. Simone moved around a lot with her mum who crashed on various friends’ couches, and inevitably turned to drink and drugs to deal with the disappointment that her life had become.

He knew that Simone had watched as her mother became more and more dependent on drugs, to the point where she needed them just to get up in the morning. Simone was used to preparing her own breakfast and making her own way to school, desperate to escape whichever house or flat they were staying in at the time.

He knew that she’d dreamt of her father returning and rescuing her and that she imagined he’d gone off in search of a better life and that he’d always planned to come back for his daughter.

He knew that at five years old, Simone was worried her father wouldn’t be able to find them because they moved around so much. At six, she went back to their old house on her birthday just in case he came by with a birthday present. At eight, she wrote him a letter and saved it in her special box for his homecoming and at nine years old she made of list of things that a better life might look like and thought maybe it would take a little bit of time for her father to do all those things. By ten, she asked her mother if she thought he was ever coming back, and at eleven, she screamed at her mother that it was all her fault.

After that, she tried not to think about him.