When we were 19, my best friend and I promised that if we were both single at 60, we’d find each other — I turned 60 last Tuesday, and my old landline rang.

Which means that when he wrote to me that he had met a girl at college and it was serious, his son was four months old.

He had a baby before he had a wedding, and he had a wedding before he had the courage to write me a letter, and he wrote the letter in the wrong order so that it read like a romance instead 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.