‘Yes.’ Sal nodded. ‘I mean, is he really dying?’

‘Foster looks no different to the day he walked out on us.’ Maddy took a bite out of her bagel. Still chewing, she continued. ‘Not a single day older. Which, of course, he isn’t … because for him, every time I go see him in Central Park, it’s the same day he walked out.’ She finished chewing and swigged some coffee. ‘It’ll be us that look different to him, I guess. Not the other way round.’

‘Aye,’ nodded Liam. ‘We’ve been together a while now … seems like we’ve been together an eternity, though.’

‘Seventy-five cycles,’ said Bob. ‘One hundred and forty-nine days.’

‘Five months,’ added Sal. She looked up at Liam and Maddy. ‘Jahulla! That makes me fourteen now. My birthday, it was only four months away when I … I was meant to die.’ She didn’t need to elaborate on that. They all knew each other’s recruitment tales.

‘I missed my fourteenth birthday,’ she added quietly.

Becks cocked her head and the appropriate smile for the occasion flashed across her face, as sincere as a screensaver. ‘Many happy returns, Sal Vikram.’

Liam put down the chocolate muffin he’d been peeling out of its paper cup. ‘Hang on, I’ve missed my seventeenth birthday!’ He reached out and squeezed Sal’s hand. ‘So, a happy birthday to us both, so it is.’

‘Yeah,’ she mumbled, ‘yay for us.’

‘Uhh, so,’ Maddy sighed, ‘this was meant to be fun. Not a freakin’ funeral!’ She turned to Sal. ‘We’ll get a cake on the way home, get some candles on it and you can blow ’em out and … and we’ll play some party games or something when we get back. How does that sound?’

She nodded. The start of a smile back on her face. ‘I’d like that.’

‘Party games?’ said Bob. ‘Please explain how to sub-categorize “party games” in reference to “games”?’

Maddy shrugged. ‘They’re just stupid games. You don’t play to win. You just play because it’s a laugh. Like, I dunno … like Charades or Guess Who, or Twister. The more you mess things up the more fun it is.’