I have a choice. Drive to work, or drive myself mad. I choose work, for now, mad might come later. I’m still trying to digest what Tom told me last night. The pure unadulterated mess of it all. It turns out this Kenny kid, who half belongs to my husband, is the surviving child of the dead woman whose body was found in Sycamore. The woman whose plants I was admiring on the TV… whose neighbours think she was a lovely woman.

For most of the night I sat on the sofa staring into the darkness, trying to come to terms with what Tom had told me.

The one-night stand had taken place when Tom had started going out with me, but we weren’t going serious and definitely not engaged. It happened the night his team won the championship final and everyone was in Copper’s nightclub celebrating and getting bombed out of their minds. I got the exact date from the championship medal he keeps propped in between his two golf trophies.

Tom kept apologizing, going on and on about how he was pissed and how he never meant it to happen. That it only ever happened the once. He only ever loved me, blah, blah, blah, blah and he never saw the girl again. He didn’t even remember her name. My guess is he never knew her name. Copper’s nightclub has a way of blowing the base off people’s standards.

There’s a part of me feels slightly sorry for Tom, the fool. I still love him despite all his faults. Nothing ever goes right for him. Even a one-night stand seventeen years ago has come back to bite him. Now he’s the sole guardian to a kid he doesn’t even know. And the worst part about all of this is the police want Tom to take care of Kenny, to bring him to our house. To live with us. Such madness.

This is where I will have to put my foot down. A sixteen-year-old boy that we’ve never met moving in on top of us would not work. What are the police thinking? Jesus, Amber would have a fit. She already thinks the house is too small and that we should be moving to one of the big houses they’re building on the old hospital grounds down the road. Dream on, Amber.

So that’s where we left it, after talking for less than half an hour and not talking for a further two. Tom squeezed me tightly, asked me to forgive him for not telling me earlier and promised me he would sort the whole mess out so that it would not affect our family. Tom is going to tell the cops that we will not be taking Kenny to live with us, that we feel the kid would be better off with people he actually knows at this sad time.