'Stop.'
'I know.'
'You sound like a public information film about a vaccine.'
'I know.'
'Again. Without the paper.'
He closed the laptop. Looked at the dishcloth on the edge of the sink, blue, folded into a neat rectangle as Gemma folded everything, and tried the sentence with nothing between him and it.
'Freddie. You know Mr Cavanaugh. He's...' The word lodged. He swallowed it. 'He's my...'
'Use it.'
'Partner. He's my partner.'
'Better. What else.'
'That we... we're together. Like Mummy and Owen are together. That he likes me very much and he likes you very much and...'
'Stop telling him how everybody feels about him. He doesn't care. What does he actually want to know?'
Neil thought about it. Really thought, the way Freddie thought about fork placement and dinosaur weight and whether wisdom had an age.
'He wants to know if Mr Cavanaugh is going to paint him a dragon.'
'Right.'
'And whether it'll be a real dragon or a Freddie dragon.'
'Right.'
'And whether I'm still his dad.'
'There we go.' Gemma pushed the laptop further away from him with one finger, exiling it. 'Start with the dragon. The dragon is the language. Everything else follows.'
His tea had gone cold. He drank it anyway. He'd brought a script. He was being sent home without it.
'Thank you.'
'Don't thank me. Just promise me that if you say _special friend_ on Saturday I am allowed to say it to Freddie myself the next time he's here, and explain to him that it's what grown-ups call each other when they're too frightened to use the right word.'
'Agreed.'
'Good.'
He'd driven home with the Post-it still in his pocket and the script still on his laptop.
So Neil had a plan and then didn't use it, because Freddie asked first.
They were in the kitchen. Saturday morning. Scrambled eggs. Freddie at the table with felt-tips, drawing a whale, a new obsession that had arrived without warning, as Freddie's obsessions did. He'd found a book in the school library and had been quoting cetacean facts ever since. The whale had a top hat, because Freddie believed all animals were improved by formal headwear.
'Dad.'
'Mm.'
'Is Mr Cavanaugh making you happy?'
