Thirteen Years After Our Divorce, I Ran Into My Ex-Husband and His Mistress’s Son at an Academic Competition. He Snapped, “How Dare You Come Here!” But When My Twins Stepped Up to Collect Their Gold Medals, He Turned Purple…
Thirteen years after Dominic walked out, I did not expect to see him in a queue for a registration desk.
But there he was, in the foyer of Tannery Hall at the Merrow Prize finals, with Seren next to him and their son Rafe in the blazer of St Aldwyn’s.
He saw me and his whole face changed.
“Bron?”
First time in thirteen years he has said my name to my face.
And then the surprise turned into something else.
“What are you doing here?”
Seren came a step closer and told me, pleasantly, that this was a private event.
“It’s a state competition,” I said. “It’s in the name.”
And Dominic lowered his voice, which he does when he is angriest, and about nine people heard it anyway.
“How dare you come here today.”
And what he did not look at was the two boys standing four feet behind me.
He looked straight past them. Or he did not know them, which is likelier, because the last photograph he has of those two is from a christening.
“I’m here for my children.”
**He laughed. “*Your* children?”**
His eyes went to them for about a second and came back to me. He saw two lads in supermarket jackets with lanyards on. He did not see anything else.
“This weekend matters to Rafe,” he said.
“It matters to Idris and Cai as well.”
Thirteen years of birthdays, concerts, science fairs, a night in A&E with croup, two GCSE results days and about four thousand ordinary evenings, and that man was standing in a foyer working out why I had turned up to annoy him.
I did not argue. I turned round.
“Come on. Registration shuts in ten minutes.”
And walking down the corridor Cai said, quietly, “Mum. That was him, wasn’t it.”
“Yes.”
And Idris looked back once.
“Our dad?”
“Yes.”
And neither of them said anything else, and I thought that was shock.
It was not shock. It was the two of them deciding not to tell me something in a corridor, which I did not find out for another six hours.
What happened at four o’clock.
The Merrow Prize does the individual awards first and then the team.
Idris took gold in applied mathematics. Cai took gold in the physical sciences paper, with the highest raw mark in the state, which they announce, because that is the sort of thing that competition enjoys.
Two golds. Same surname. Same row.
And I watched my ex-husband, eleven seats along and four rows back, work it out in stages.
First when the surname was read out the second time.
Then when they stood up together.
Then when Cai — who has my father’s exact build and Dominic’s exact face, and there is nothing anybody can do about that — turned round at the front of the stage and looked for me in the audience and grinned.
And I have been asked by four different people whether it was satisfying.
It was, for about eleven seconds, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
And then it stopped being, because a man two rows in front of me leaned over to his wife and said, “Who are they?” — and I realised that every single person in that hall had a better claim to ask that question than the man it was actually about.
The thirteen years, in the order they happened.
He left on the ninth of March, 2012. The boys were three years and one week old.
He did not leave for Seren, incidentally, whatever the version in Halbrook says. He left in the March and she came in about the December, and I have never blamed that woman for the marriage and I am not starting now.
He saw them four times in 2012 and twice in 2013. The last of those was a Saturday in the November at a soft play in Halbrook, and he was forty minutes late, and he took a work call for eleven minutes of the hour he was there.
Nothing in 2014. Nothing in 2015. A card each in 2016, posted late, with twenty pounds in each.
Then the letter in 2018, which I will come back to.
And nothing at all after that until a foyer in 2025.
What I was doing in the same period: the depot four days a week, and the shop on Saturdays from 2015, and a flat over a launderette in Gatley Bank until 2019, when I got the house.
My mother did Wednesdays until she died in 2021. After that it was a woman called Ivy two doors down, who took two eleven-year-olds in after school for four years and would not take a penny for three of them.
I am putting that in because the medals are the part everybody wants, and the medals were not built in that auditorium.
They were built by a woman two doors down, and a grandmother on Wednesdays, and about eleven hundred evenings at a kitchen table where somebody checked the homework.
What I did not know.
Here is the part that turned that weekend into something entirely different from the story people tell about it.
At about half six, in the car park, Rafe Farrow came over to my sons.
Thirteen years old, blazer, extremely nervous, and he said — and Cai has repeated this to me three times because I kept asking — “Are you allowed to talk to me?”
And Idris said: “Yeah. Obviously.”
They had known about each other for two weeks.
Not because of me. Not because of him.
Because all three of them are on the Northern Quiz League, which is an online thing that runs from September to May, where you are assigned to a squad by ranking and everybody uses a handle.
Idris and Cai have been on a squad with a boy called rafe_f_07 since the September of 2024. Thirty-odd Thursday evenings. My sons have been coaching a thirteen-year-old through algebra on a headset since the autumn, and calling him mate, and taking the mick out of his spelling.
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.”
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