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.

And he did the thing that I think a great many young men did in 1985 and 1986 and never talked about afterwards.

He stayed.

And then the second decision, which is the one that cost us both everything, and which he made entirely on his own in about four minutes at a kitchen table.

He decided that if he told me the truth — a baby, a wedding, the whole of it — I would write back.

“You’d have written back and said something kind,” he said. “You’d have said you were happy for me. And I’d have read it about four hundred times.”

“And then one day I’d have got in the car.”

So he wrote the version that made him look like a man who had simply fallen in love with somebody else, and he added a line asking me never to contact him, and he made himself somebody I could be angry with instead of somebody I would wait for.