They did not know what to call each other. They did not know whether to hug. He had brought a printout from the genealogy site and put it on the table like a solicitor.
The second was better. The third they laughed.
By the fifth he was telling her things about Martin that she had never had — that he could not whistle, that he sang in the car, that he called everybody chief.
And she said that was the strange part. She had spent eighteen years with a father who was a name and an absence. And in five months she got a person, from a boy who was angry with him.
The ninth was the garden centre car park. He could not walk far by then. They sat in her friend’s car with the engine off for an hour and a half.
The eleventh was on the nineteenth of December, in the hospital, in the day room, and it lasted eleven minutes because he was so tired.
