When we were 19, my best friend and I promised that if we were both single at 60, we’d find each other — I turned 60 last Tuesday, and my old landline rang.

to a woman called Nerys who answered the phone and was extremely nice about it.

I told him I had something to say that was twenty-eight years late and that he was under no obligation to care about it.

And I told him the truth: that in 1997, in a car outside the Bridge House, I had told him I did not feel that way, and that I had not been telling the truth, and that the actual reason was that I was holding something from when I was nineteen and I could not work out how to put it down.

And Douglas Ferris was quiet for a bit and then he said: “Lorna. I knew.”

And I said what do you mean you knew.

And he said: “Everybody in Rowe’s Mill knew. You used to go a bit funny if anybody mentioned him. I asked you anyway because I