And in the April the Merrow Prize published the finals rosters — real names, schools, the lot — and three boys sat in three different rooms and worked out what they were looking at.
And they did what teenagers do, which is that they said nothing to a single adult for two weeks and dealt with it in a group chat.
What the boys had decided.
They had a plan. They had a plan and it involved not telling me, which I have had to be reasonable about.
The plan was: Rafe would not say anything to his parents before the finals, because his mother had told him in the February that his father had “two older sons who don’t want anything to do with him”.
That is what Seren Farrow believed. I am fairly sure she still believed it in that foyer.
And Rafe — thirteen, in a blazer, in a car park — said to my sons: “Is that true? Did you not want to?”
And Cai said no.
And Rafe said: “Right.” And then he said: “I thought so, because you’re not like that.”
Thirty Thursdays on a headset were enough for a thirteen-year-old to know that the version of my sons he had been given at home was not real.
And the two weeks before the finals, which I have since had described to me by all three boys and which I would pay money to have watched.
The rosters went up on a Tuesday in the April. Real names, schools, ages.
Cai saw it first, at about eleven at night, and did not say anything to his brother until the morning, which for those two is an extraordinary act of restraint.
And what they did — and I want this on the record, because everybody assumes teenagers handle these things badly — is that they did nothing for four days.
Then they wrote to Rafe. Not on the squad chat, where the others would see. A direct message, from Idris’s account, and they drafted it together, and Cai has shown me the drafts because he keeps everything.
There are eleven versions of that message.
Version one is four paragraphs and begins We think we might be related to you, which Idris says he read back and decided sounded like a scam about an inheritance.
Version eleven, the one they sent, is two lines.
***Mate — is your dad Dominic Farrow? Don’t panic. We think we’ve got the same one. No stress either way.***
Two sixteen-year-olds spent four days and eleven drafts making sure a thirteen-year-old would not be frightened by it.
And he replied in about ninety seconds with one word, which was yeah, and then nothing for two hours, and then: are you the ones who don’t want to see him?
Seren.
She rang me on the fourth of June, about three weeks later.
I nearly did not take it. I am glad I did, and I am not going to make her into a villain, because the evidence does not support it.
She met Dominic in 2011 and she has been with him since 2012, and she knew there had been a first marriage and two children.
What she was told, and what she has been told consistently for thirteen years, is that I refused contact, that I had turned the boys against him, and that after a certain point he had decided — sadly, for their sake — to stop upsetting everybody.
She said: “He told me you’d had them told he was dead.”
I said: that would have been a strange thing to do, given they’ve had a photograph of him on their bookshelf since 2014.
And there was a silence on that phone that went on for a long time.
She asked me about the maintenance. I told her the truth, which is that between 2012 and 2019 he paid nothing at all, that the arrears were enforced in 2019 through the courts, and that it has been paid by direct deduction ever since and has never once been late, because it is not up to him.
She did not know any of that either.
And what the boys said to me in the car on the way home, which is the conversation I had been dreading since 2012 and which lasted about four minutes.
We were on the ring road. Cai was driving, on his provisional, with me white-knuckled in the passenger seat, which rather took the ceremony out of it.
