It was during the final hymn, after the button had been pressed and Fat Charlie’s mother had trundled off down the conveyor belt to her final reward, that Fat Charlie noticed a man of about his own age standing at the back of the chapel. It was not his father, obviously. It was someone he did not know, someone he might not even have noticed, at the back, in the shadows, had he not been looking for his father—and then there was the stranger, in an elegant black suit, his eyes lowered, his hands folded.

Fat Charlie let his glance linger a moment too long, and the stranger looked at Fat Charlie and flashed him a joyless smile of the kind that suggested that they were both in this together. It was not the kind of expression you see on the faces of strangers, but still, Fat Charlie could not place the man. He turned his face back to the front of the chapel. They sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” a song Fat Charlie was pretty sure his mother had always disliked, and the Reverend Wright invited them back to Fat Charlie’s Great-Aunt Alanna’s for something to eat.

There was nobody at his Great-Aunt Alanna’s whom he did not already know. In the years since his mother had died, he sometimes wondered about that stranger: who he was, why he was there. Sometimes Fat Charlie thought that he had simply imagined him—

“So,” said Rosie, draining her Chardonnay, “you’ll call your Mrs. Higgler and give her my mobile number. Tell her about the wedding and the date—that’s a thought: do you think we should invite her?”

“We can if we like,” said Fat Charlie. “I don’t think she’ll come. She’s an old family friend. She knew my dad back in the dark ages.”

“Well, sound her out. See if we should send her an invitation.”

Rosie was a good person. There was in Rosie a little of the essence of Francis of Assisi, of Robin Hood, of Buddha and of Glinda the Good: the knowledge that she was about to bring together her true love and his estranged father gave her forthcoming wedding an extra dimension, she decided. It was no longer simply a wedding: it was now practically a humanitarian mission, and Fat Charlie had known Rosie long enough to know never to stand between his fiancée and her need to Do Good.