‘He will come,’ said Nicky, who was suddenly not entirely sure he would.

‘I know that.’

The silence that followed was long enough that they were forced to smile awkwardly at each other. The corridor emptied slowly, apart from one organizer who murmured to himself as he ran his pencil down a list of names.

‘Probably stuck in traffic.’

‘It was pretty bad.’

Nicky could picture Tanzie on the other side of the door, squinting at her papers, looking around for help that wouldn’t come. Jess stared up at the ceiling, swore softly, then tied and retied her ponytail. He guessed she was doing the same.

And then there was the sound of a distant commotion and Mr Nicholls appeared, running down the corridor like a crazy man and holding aloft a plastic bag that looked as if it might be entirely full of pairs of glasses. And as he launched himself at the desk and started arguing with the organizers – the kind of argument that comes from someone who knows there is no way in the world he is going to lose – the relief Nicky felt was so overwhelming that he had to go outside, slump against the wall and drop his head to his knees until his breathing no longer threatened to turn into a huge, gulping sob.

It was weird saying goodbye to Mr Nicholls. They stood by his car in the drizzle and Jess was acting all oh-I-don’t-care, even though she obviously did. And Nicky really wanted to thank him for the whole hacking thing, driving them all that way and just being, you know, weirdly decent, but then Mr Nicholls went and gave him his spare phone and he was so choked that all that came out was this weird strangulated ‘Thanks.’ And then that was it. And he and Jess were walking across the campus car park with Norman, and both of them were pretending they couldn’t hear Mr Nicholls’s car driving away.

They stopped by the corridor, and Jess stashed their bags in the cloakroom. Then she turned to Nicky and brushed non-existent fluff from his shoulder, and her voice was so brusque that for a moment he didn’t notice her jaw was really really tight. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘let’s go and walk this dog, shall we?’

It was true that Nicky didn’t talk much. It wasn’t that he didn’t have stuff to say. It was just that there was nobody he really wanted to say it to. Ever since he had gone to live with Dad and Jess, when he was eight, people had been trying to get him to talk about his ‘feelings’, like they were a big rucksack he could just drag around with him and open up for everyone to examine the contents. But half the time he didn’t even know what he thought. He didn’t have opinions about politics or the economy or what happened to him. He didn’t even have an opinion about his birth mum. She was an addict. She liked drugs more than she liked him. What else was there to say?

Nicky went to the counselling for a bit, like they said. The woman seemed to want him to get mad about what had happened to him. Nicky had told her he wasn’t angry because he understood that his mum couldn’t look after him. It wasn’t as if it was personal. If he had been any kid she would have dumped them just the same. She was just … sad. He had seen so little of her when he was small that he didn’t even really feel like she was anything to do with him.

But the counsellor kept saying: ‘You must let it out, Nicholas. It’s not good for you to internalize what happened to you.’ She gave him two little stuffed figures and wanted him to act out ‘how your mother’s abandonment made you feel’.

Nicky didn’t like to tell her that it was the thought of having to sit in her office playing with dolls and being called Nicholas that made him feel destructive. He just wasn’t a particularly angry person. Not with his real mum, not even with Jason Fisher, although he didn’t expect anyone to understand. Fisher was just an idiot who didn’t have the brainpower to do anything but hit out. Fisher knew on some deep level that he had nothing. That he was never going to be anything. He knew that he was a phoney, and that nobody liked him, not really. So he turned it all outwards, transferred his bad feelings to the nearest available person (See? The therapy had done something useful).

So when Jess said they should go for a walk, a little bit of Nicky was wary. He didn’t want to get into some big conversation about his feelings. He didn’t want to discuss any of it. He was all braced to deflect, and then she scratched her head a bit, and said, ‘Is it just me, or does it feel a bit weird without Mr Nicholls?’

This was what they talked about:

The unexpected beauty of some of Aberdeen’s buildings.

The dog.

Whether either of them had brought plastic bags for the dog.

Which of them was going to kick that thing under the parked car so that nobody trod in it.

The best way to clean the toes of your shoes on grass.

Whether it was actually possible to clean the toes of your shoes on grass.

Nicky’s face, as in did it hurt. (Answer: no, not any more.)

Other bits of him, as in did they (no, no, and a bit, but it was improving.)

His jeans, as in why didn’t he pull them up so that his pants weren’t always showing?

Why his pants were actually his own business.

Whether they should tell Dad about the Rolls. Nicky told her she should pretend it had been nicked. What would he know? And it would serve him right. But Jess said she couldn’t lie to him because that wouldn’t be fair. And then she went quiet for a while.

Was he okay? Did he feel better for being away from home? Was he worried about going home? This was where Nicky stopped talking and started shrugging. What was there to say?