**He laughed. “*Your* children?”**
His eyes went to them for about a second and came back to me. He saw two lads in supermarket jackets with lanyards on. He did not see anything else.
“This weekend matters to Rafe,” he said.
“It matters to Idris and Cai as well.”
Thirteen years of birthdays, concerts, science fairs, a night in A&E with croup, two GCSE results days and about four thousand ordinary evenings, and that man was standing in a foyer working out why I had turned up to annoy him.
I did not argue. I turned round.
“Come on. Registration shuts in ten minutes.”
And walking down the corridor Cai said, quietly, “Mum. That was him, wasn’t it.”
“Yes.”
And Idris looked back once.
“Our dad?”
“Yes.”
And neither of them said anything else, and I thought that was shock.
It was not shock. It was the two of them deciding not to tell me something in a corridor, which I did not find out for another six hours.
What happened at four o’clock.
The Merrow Prize does the individual awards first and then the team.
Idris took gold in applied mathematics. Cai took gold in the physical sciences paper, with the highest raw mark in the state, which they announce, because that is the sort of thing that competition enjoys.
Two golds. Same surname. Same row.
And I watched my ex-husband, eleven seats along and four rows back, work it out in stages.
First when the surname was read out the second time.
Then when they stood up together.
