Then I would introduce them.
And within twenty-four hours, they were gone.
Ferris Ainge came for dinner on the ninth of August, 2024. He was forty, he sold industrial flooring, he was funny in a dry way and he brought a bottle of wine I still have.
He stopped answering my messages the next day. Not a fight, not a fade — a full stop, after eleven weeks of talking every single day.
Lowell Bray came on the twenty-first of February, 2025. Twelve days later he told me, in a text message, that work had “become a lot” and that he wasn’t in a place for a relationship. He’d been made redundant in January. He had nothing but time.
Casimir Rusk came on the twelfth of September, 2025.
Casimir blocked my number before I had a chance to ask him a single question. I found out because a message I sent the next morning never went from one grey tick to two.
At first I blamed myself, and I want to be honest about how completely I did that.
I decided I’d introduced them too fast. I decided the reality of two children was different from the idea of them. I decided I was too much, or too tired, or that men in their forties say they respect a devoted mother and mean the opposite.
I lost about a stone that autumn without trying.
But after Casimir I could not ignore the shape of it.
Three men. Three completely different men, in three completely different jobs, who did not know each other. And the same event, in the same house, at the same table, immediately before every one of them disappeared.
Dinner with my daughters.
And here is the thing that took me the longest to accept, because it made no sense.
Nothing happened at those dinners. Nothing.
Sorrel and Tibby were polite. They asked questions. They cleared plates. Casimir laughed at something Tibby said about her teacher and I remember thinking, that’s it, that’s the hurdle, we’re through it.
The men left relaxed. Ferris hugged the girls goodbye at the door.
And then by the next morning they wanted nothing to do with me, and not one of them would tell me why.
I asked all three. Directly.
Ferris left the message unread for four days and then unfriended me on everything. Lowell replied to a very long, very undignified message I am not proud of with the word “sorry” and nothing else. Casimir I never spoke to again.
It was not embarrassment. I have been ghosted before, in my twenties, and this was not that.
They were behaving like people who had been told something.
So in February of this year, I asked Roan Delaney for a favour.
Roan is forty-one. We have worked together at Pellam Freight for six years — he does the scheduling side and I do the accounts and we have shared a bad coffee machine since 2020.
He is the most unflappable person I know. He is also entirely uninterested in me romantically and I in him, and that mattered.
He laughed at me for a solid minute.
“You want me to spy on your kids.”
“I want you to come to dinner as my boyfriend and then tell me what happens when I leave the room.”
“Tamsin—”
“Roan. Three men. Same night, every time. They’re doing something and they’re doing it while I’m not there.”
He stopped laughing about halfway through that sentence.
He said yes on the Wednesday.
He came on Friday the sixth of March.
I introduced him as somebody I’d started seeing at the beginning of the year. I’d primed the girls the day before — new person, be nice, don’t be weird.
