‘After that first letter you wrote to me almost every week,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t write back to you as you didn’t include your address but I didn’t mind. I thought that if I wrote back you’d be disappointed. I didn’t inherit my father’s way with words so any letter you got from me would have been deathly dull. Best to let you do the writing and believe that the person you were talking to was Angus. But I used to look forward to seeing those little yellow envelopes landing on the doormat. It seemed I’d finally found someone who understood me.’

I see myself sitting at the little wooden desk in my bedroom, writing carefully on the pale-lemon notepaper Mum had bought me for my last birthday.

‘I treasured those letters,’ he says, his voice piercing my memory. ‘But then my father found them and told me I had to get rid of them. Said it was inappropriate because I was fourteen and you were just a kid. But it wasn’t inappropriate, was it, Iris? It was beautiful. Anyway, I ignored the old goat and kept the letters. Once I found out where you were living I decided to send them to you, see if you would remember.’

I look up and suddenly the fog of twenty years begins to lift.

‘It wasn’t a story,’ I say, my voice trembling. ‘You were real.’

‘I guess so,’ says the man with a shrug. ‘Though I’ve always felt like a half-person, like if I ever showed anyone the real me, I would be a huge disappointment.’

He stands up and goes to the window.

‘My father robbed me of my childhood,’ he says, scratching his finger along the pane of glass. ‘He stole my identity and sold my life to the world as a dream when in reality it was hell.’

I glance at the open door. I should make a run for it but something holds me back. Is it that I feel sorry for this lost and lonely man?

‘After you left the night of the party, I came back up here and tried to get on with my work,’ he says, his eyes fixed on the window. ‘I was making a model aeroplane. That was one of the things that helped to calm me – focusing on the details helped keep the bad stuff out of my head. But there was so much noise coming from the garden, the fireworks display, the shouting and shrieking from the kids. Finally, after messing up the paint on the body of the plane, I decided enough was enough. I hammered on the window and yelled at them to shut up, but I didn’t realize how fragile the glass was and my fist went straight through. My hand never really healed.’