My parents threw me out at nineteen because I wouldn’t end my pregnancy. Ten years later I drove back with my son and knocked on the same door and I finally told them who his father was.

Our father does not have bad news. He has problems, and problems have solutions, and a man who cannot produce a solution has not tried.

Rhys had watched him do it to a cousin in 2013 and to his own brother in 2016.

He said, in that car park: he’ll make it about what I should have done.

And he was right. I know 

he was right, because eight years later, in a kitchen, my father said to me — about Rhys, about the diagnosis, about a boy who had been dead for eight years — he should have gone in sooner.

Before treatment started, he stored samples. Everybody in his position is offered it and most people say yes without thinking about it very hard.

And then, later, when it had gone the way it went, he asked me.

His girlfriend had left in the November. There was nobody else. And they had told him what they tell people when the numbers are what his were.