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.”
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.
And Idris said from the back: “Were you ever going to tell us he’d be there?”
And I said I did not know he would be.
And he said: “No, but — if you’d known.”
And I had to sit with that for about a mile, because the honest answer is that I would have told them on the morning, in the car park, at the last possible second, so that there was no time for anybody to decide not to go in.
So I said that.
And there was a silence, and then Cai said: “Yeah. That’s what we thought.”
Not angry. Just — filed. The way you confirm a thing you have already worked out about somebody.
Sixteen years old, and my sons had a working model of how their mother manages information, and it was accurate, and they had had it for a while.
I have thought about that more than the foyer, and considerably more than the stage.
What I have had to take.
And here is mine, because I am not going to write four thousand words in which one man is the whole problem.
In the January of 2018 Dominic wrote to my sons.
One letter, addressed to both of them, care of me, at the old house. Four sides, handwritten.
They were eight.
I did not give it to them.
I read it twice and I put it in the box file in the wardrobe with the court papers and I have moved house once since then and it came with me.
My reasons — and I have had to say all of these out loud to a woman called Halla on Wednesdays, which is a very different thing from thinking them — were as follows.
He had not seen them in four years. He had paid nothing in four years. The letter arrived eleven days before a hearing about arrears.
And there is a paragraph in it, on the third side, about how he would love to see them and how it has always been made impossible for him.
So I decided, at thirty-six, on my own, at a kitchen table, that it was a tactical document, and I did not hand it to two eight-year-olds.
I think I was right about the letter.
I know I was wrong to keep it for seven years after that.
Because whatever it was for, it was addressed to them. And every year I did not mention it, the not-mentioning became a bigger thing than the letter, until by about 2022 there was no version of telling them that did not require me to explain why I had not told them in 2018.
And that is exactly the shape of what his mother did, and what I have criticised that family for since 2013, and I did the same thing in my own wardrobe for seven years.
What I did with it.
I gave it to them on the twenty-ninth of June, three weeks after Seren’s phone call, with the box file on the kitchen table.
Not because I had become brave. Because Rafe existed now, and there was going to be a version of all this coming at them from the other direction, and I was not going to be caught.
I told them what it was, when it came, and that I had made a decision about it in 2018 that was mine and that they were entitled to be angry about.
Idris read it first. He read it twice, the same way I had.
And then he passed it to his brother and went and stood by the back door with his hands on his head, which is what that boy has done since he was four when something is too big.
Cai read it once and put it down and said: “He spelled Idris wrong.”
Which he had. With a y. On the envelope and twice inside.
Their father wrote his son’s name wrong four times in a four-page letter and nobody at that kitchen table, including me, had noticed until a sixteen-year-old said it out loud.
What happened afterwards.
They wrote to him. Both of them, one letter, in the July, which they did not show me and which I did not ask to see.
They asked to meet him once. Not at his house. In a café in Halbrook, on neutral ground, with me sitting somewhere else in the same café, which was Cai’s condition and which I thought was very sensible and slightly heartbreaking.
He came. I will give him that, and I have to give it to him because it is the only thing I have to give him in this entire account.
Forty minutes. I could see the back of his head.
And what my sons have told me about it is this.
He spent the first ten minutes explaining. The middle twenty on the subject of what I had done. And the last ten asking them about their subjects, which Idris says was “actually all right, he was quite interested.”
And at the end he said he would be in touch about doing it again.
That was the twenty-sixth of July, 2025.
He has not been in touch. It is now fourteen months.
And the thing Dominic actually said, on the stairs at Tannery Hall, about twenty minutes after the ceremony.
I was on my way out and he came down four steps and stood in front of me, and Seren was at the bottom with Rafe, and there were still people everywhere.
And he said: “You could have told me.”
Not are they all right. Not is that Cai. Not one question about a boy who had just taken the highest mark in the state.
***You could have told me.***
And I said: told you what, Dominic?
And he said: “That they were doing this. Any of it. I’d have — ” and then he stopped, because he could not finish that sentence in a public stairwell with his wife eleven feet away, and because there is no end to it that survives being said out loud.
I would have what. Come? Helped? Been there?
He had my mobile number for thirteen years. It has not changed since 2009. It is the same number that was on every court document and every school form and every letter his solicitor ever sent.
And I said that, and then I went round him and out to the car, and that is the last thing I have ever said to my ex-husband.
Rafe.
This is the part that has surprised everybody, including me.
Rafe Farrow comes to my house.
It started with the Quiz League — they carried on, obviously, all the way to the May — and then it was a Saturday in the August, and then it was every other Saturday, and now it is most weeks.
Seren drives him. She has been in my kitchen four times and has had a cup of tea twice, which for two women in our position is a diplomatic triumph.
He is fourteen now and he is bright and he is extremely funny and he is, at the moment, a bit lost.
Because what happened to that boy in a car park in the May is that he found out that his father had two other sons and had lied about them for his whole life.
He has not got over it and he is not going to for a while.
And Dominic, who does not ring my two, has been perfectly present with him — same house, same school runs, football on Sundays — and I have had to watch a fourteen-year-old sit at my table and try to work out how both of those things can be true about the same man.
I do not say anything about his father in that kitchen. Not one word, in fourteen months. It is the single hardest piece of self-control I have ever managed and I have failed at it precisely once, and my own sons pulled me up on it before Rafe had even left the room.
And Ivy Sandoe, two doors down, who is eighty-one and who came to the finals.
She came in a taxi that she paid for and would not discuss, and she sat next to me, and when Cai’s mark was read out she took hold of my wrist and did not let go of it for the rest of the ceremony.
She did four years of after-school for those two, from 2016 to 2020, and she would not take money for three of them, and in the end I had to start paying her electricity bill by standing order and telling her it was an administrative error at the energy company, which she has never believed and has never challenged.
In the car park afterwards, Dominic walked past about six feet from her and did not know who she was.
And she watched him go and then she said, to me, in her ordinary voice: “Is that him?”
And I said yes.
And she said: “He’s smaller than I thought.”
Which is not true. He is six foot one. It is the single best sentence anybody said that entire weekend.
Where things are.
Idris and Cai are seventeen. They are in the upper sixth at Gatley Bank Academy, which is an ordinary state school, and they both have offers to read, respectively, engineering and physics.
The medals are in a drawer. Both of them, in the same drawer, in the kitchen, with the takeaway menus, because when I put them on the shelf in the front room Cai took them down again and said it was embarrassing.
I still work at the depot. Four days, and the Saturday at the shop until the September, when I stopped, because for the first time since 2012 I did not need the second one.
And I see Halla on Wednesdays, which started as being about the foyer and has been about a box file since about the August.
And the photograph on the bookshelf, which I mentioned to Seren on the phone as though it were obvious and which requires an explanation.
It has been there since 2014. It is Dominic at twenty-eight, on a beach, holding two babies in one of those double slings, looking knackered and delighted.
Ivy asked me once, in about 2018, why on earth I kept it up.
And I gave her the answer I had ready, which was that they were entitled to know what he looked like.
That is true and it is not the whole of it.
The other part — which took until this year to be able to say — is that I wanted them to see, every day, that he had once been that. That there had been a man on a beach with two babies strapped to him, and that he had chosen, later, to stop being him.
I told myself I was giving them their father.
I was, for eleven years, quietly presenting the case for the prosecution on a shelf at eye level in my own front room.
Cai moved it in the September. Not away — across, to the lower shelf, behind the football trophies, where you can still see it if you look.
He did not announce it. I noticed about a fortnight later.
And when I asked him he shrugged and said: “It’s just a photo, Mum.”
And the last thing.
The last page of that letter.
Four sides, 2018, and the last paragraph is the one I have thought about for eight years.
It says that he knows he has been useless. It says he will do whatever anybody wants. And then it says, in the last two lines, that he hopes the boys will understand one day that some situations are made impossible and that he was never given a fair chance.
And underneath, his name, and then a P.S. about the hearing on the nineteenth.
A postscript about the hearing.
Idris read that paragraph out loud at my kitchen table on the twenty-ninth of June, and then he looked up and said: “You were right.”
And I said I did not think it was that simple.
And Cai — who says about a third as much as his brother and whose one third tends to land — said:
“No, he’s right, you were right about what it was.”