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the children then tell them. I had to pretend I believed any of it was happening. I could only cope with that if Fynn was there, too.
    In the present, he exhales quietly but at length and I imagine his navy blue eyes slipping shut, his broad shoulders moving downwards as they’re forced to relax, his torso contracting as he holds himself ready.
You can do this, Fynn
, he’s telling himself,
you can cope with whatever it is
.
    ‘Phoebe’s pregnant,’ I say. I was going to gently lead him into it, explain about being called to the school, the headmaster, that
The
Mr Bromsgrove fella, how I realised what was going on right before I was told – but doing it like that would have been cruel. Revelations this huge should be delivered straight away – you can comfort and cosset the blow afterwards, the preamble takes the listener to all sorts of places they don’t need to visit before fully receiving the news.
    Fynn’s inaudible reply is obviously shock. Incomprehension at what I’ve said. ‘Phoebe who?’ he eventually says. Not shock: confusion; he’s been trying to work out who I could be talking about because it’s
that
ludicrous an idea it could be the only Phoebe he knows.
    ‘Your goddaughter, Zane’s sister, my and Joel’s daughter.’
    Silence returns to his side of the phone. Eventually he speaks again: ‘But she’s fourteen,’ he states. ‘You need to … You know what you need to do to get pregnant and she’s only fourteen.’
    ‘I know,’ I reply.
    ‘Are you sure about this, Saff?’ He thinks I’ve lost it, that I am out of my mind.
    ‘Yes. She told a teacher at school and they called me in. She’s about four weeks pregnant. Or whatever it is in real terms of last period etc.’
    Silence. This time it is shock. ‘Bloody hell,’ Fynn breathes. ‘
Bloody hell
.’ He understands, he knows why I am panicking: there is no easy way out of this; whatever happens next, Phoebe, my baby, will be changed for ever.
    ‘She won’t tell me who the father is,’ I explain before he asks. ‘She pretty much won’t talk to me at all. If I ask a question I get a shrug or a handful of words, but nothing that makes me understand why and how this happened. I mean, I don’t know if she was forced or pressurised or manipulated. If she wanted to. If it was all planned or a hideous mistake. I don’t know, so I don’t know how to help her. Or what I’m supposed to be doing. I wish she would talk to me. I wish I could think properly. I wish I could stop wanting to scream at her.’
    ‘Do you want me to talk to her?’
    ‘I’d love it if you could, and if it meant she’d open up, but not yet. I think she would completely lose the plot if she knew I’d told someone. But I had to because my brain was about to explode. There are so many things going on in my head and I had to get a little bit of it out. It was either you or go dig a hole in the garden and shout into it and I don’t think our garden is big enough for the hole I’d need.’
    ‘This isn’t your fault,’ he says, reading my mind as Joel used to.
    ‘Oh, really? How did you figure that one out?’
    ‘This isn’t your fault,’ he repeats, his voice taking a firmer tone.
    ‘Fynn, I know I’ve said this to you before, but when you have children and something bad – or even something not very good – happens to them you try as hard as you can to work out what you could have done differently to get a different result.’ To not have a terrified fourteen-year-old crying herself to sleep because adulthood, which was meant to come to her as drips of experience overthe coming years, has submerged her with a flood of the real world in one go. Again.
    ‘What could you have done differently?’ Behind his reasonable question, his attempt to soothe my guilt, is a man who is quietly but definitely freaking out. I can hear it in the timbre of his voice, in the spacing of his words. ‘Bloody hell’ is probably on loop in his mind and he’s