His stated reason for never paying me any child support was that his former employers - now bankrupt - would discover he had fathered a child out of wedlock and attempt to constructively dismiss him. From what I heard about said employers, there’s a good chance this is at least partly true.

But when I claimed income support as a lone parent, I was obliged to notify the child support agency, so I filled in all the forms. They needed his employers’ address, and I only had their phone number, so I phoned and asked for their address. They gave me it, and only then thought to ask who I was and why I wanted it. I muttered “Oh, er, thanks,” and hung up.

Many months later, I told him what had happened. “Oh,” he said. “That’s how they knew.” Apparently, he had been chatting about his family with his boss or one of his colleagues, and they had taken for granted that he had a child. Somehow, the most reasonable way he could imagine for them to guess his terrible secret was from my completely unattributed phone call.

If someone phoned my business and asked for the address, I might think, “That was weird.” I might even think, “I hope that wasn’t the set-up for some sort of scam - I’d better be on my guard.” There is no way I would ever think, “One of my employees must have fathered a child out of wedlock.” Either he suspected his former employers of having quite a scary psychic talent, or he felt so guilty about keeping his child secret that he was sure anyone could guess it from the most tenuous of clues.