I say, ‘I did, yeah. I thought about him a lot.’ There should be a special word for that level of understatement. When I was little, I thought about him all the time. I wrote him a letter every week, telling him how great I was, how I’d got all my maths homework right and beaten everyone in the class at sprinting, so that when I finally found an address to send them to, he would realise I was worth coming back for. I walked out of school every day looking for his white limo to scoop me up and speed me away from the bare concrete yard and the aggro-eyed kids with their places already booked in rehab and prison, away to somewhere blue and green and blazing where wonderful lives lay in glittering heaps waiting for me to choose. Every night I lay in bed imagining them: me with scrubs and a stethoscope, in a hospital so blinding with white and chrome it looked ready to lift off; me going down a sweep of staircase to an orchestra waltz, in a dress made of spin and foam; me riding horseback along a beach, eating fancy fruit in a morning courtyard, shooting orders from a leather office chair forty storeys above my dizzy view. ‘I thought the exact same as Aislinn: when he came back, that’s when my real life would start.’

Steve, God help us, is trying to find the right level of compassionate. I say, ‘Jesus, the face on you. Don’t be giving me the big sad eyes, you sap. I was like eight. And then I grew up and copped myself on, and I realised this is my real life, and I’d bleeding well better start running it myself, instead of waiting for someone else to do the job for me. That’s what grown-ups do.’

‘And now? You don’t think about him any more?’

‘Haven’t thought about him in years. I mostly forget he existed. And that’s what Aislinn would’ve done, if she had the brains of a fucking M&M. Her ma, too.’

Steve moves his head noncommittally. ‘It’s not the same thing. You never knew your father. Aislinn’s da was someone she loved.’

Probably he has a point, sort of, but I don’t care. ‘He’s someone who was gone. Aislinn and her ma, they could’ve got on with life, figured they’d deal with the answers when and if they got any. Instead they decided to make their whole lives all about someone who wasn’t even there. I don’t care who he was; that’s pathetic.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Fucking pathetic,’ I say. ‘End of story.’

Steve doesn’t answer. We keep walking. Up ahead I can see the car, right where we left it, which is nice.