of what it was.
It happened in the May of 1985. A party at the end of second year. A girl he barely knew called Adele Prentice.
He told me all of it in that room, in pieces, over about two hours, with a nurse coming in twice.
He found out in the September. Adele was keeping it. He was twenty and he had a job at a builders’ merchant and a ring in a drawer that he had bought in the August of 1984 with paint-crew money and had been carrying around for a year waiting to be brave.
And he did the thing that I think a great many young men did in 1985 and 1986 and never talked about afterwards.
He stayed.
And then the second decision, which is the one that cost us both everything, and which he made entirely on his own in about four
