Lucy asks me if I have kids. I say yes. Then she asks me if they live with me not their mother. I hesitate …

The scene plays out as I open my eyes to the light of day. I’m screamingly aware that my bedfellow is neither one of the kids nor Harry the cat. Patently it’s not even my bed. Beside me is a woman who has either avant-garde skin tone PJs with pink spots or is naked. I stare at the ceiling in both shock and unintentional tribute to Billy Crystal’s pose from When Harry Met Sally, as he wakes up to the horror of having slept with his close friend, played by Meg Ryan. With full consciousness comes great guilt at my first sex since Helen’s death and I cry like a baby.

So runs the script, but not the truth. I don’t wake up at all because we’ve not been to sleep, having spent the night, as Keats wouldn’t say, “hard at it”. Better still, or massively worse, I’m sure for some fellow widowers whose grief has taken a different trajectory to mine, it was absolutely bloody marvellous. Far from guilt, I feel like the bloke in Ice Cold in Alex longing for a cold beer while enduring days in the desert who finally gets to lift the icy glass to his lips. Well, I’ve been lifting warmer things to mine in the last few hours and do so again, so missing two of the trains home I should have boarded.

I’m away from home at a school reunion. “Come this year, Adam. You’re not working, so no excuses. I’ve been asking you for years. Bloody come!”, Tom had exhorted. I’ve ducked these dinners on the basis that the people I liked in the past I still see – they’re called friends – but the rest I wouldn’t choose to travel to meet again. More dubiously the mantra “hated them then, hate them now” holds true. However, Tom and his wife, Gail, have been kind and supportive and I agree to go.

As it turned out, I really enjoyed the reunion’s chat and camaraderie; my senses sharpened by low expectations and I suspect the sheer relief of a night off from my widower cares and bleeding practicalities.

Over dinner, by chance or by Tom’s unsubtle hand, I’m sitting directly opposite Lucy – possible the only single woman in the room anything like my age in what is a very male-dominated environment. After a slow start, we get on well, not in the same academic year but with enough common ground to kick things off and ease my way into chatting someone up (is it still called that?) for the first time in 27 years. We are getting on like a house on fire in a giggly, daft way.

Then the killer question comes, “So do you have kids?” OK, so not the married question but maybe my lack of wedding ring answers that. “Yes, I have two kids at home, which makes being away all the more of a treat.” Cheesy but stay with me on this, it really had been a long time. “So they live with you, not their mother?” Lucy asks. Momentarily, I’m tempted to lie, claim to be divorced as I’ve seen first-hand how being told that the man they’d previously quite fancied is a widower, works like a bucket of Harry Potter’s Polyjuice potion transforming any woman instantly into my mother.

But I’m not Judas and won’t deny any facet of Helen’s life or death. So I pour cold widower-water on to the rising heat of Lucy’s interest, “No, I’m afraid my wife died last year.” Even as I say it, the words sound odd. I hadn’t distanced Helen’s death into another year before.

The effect is also new; Lucy is moved but not maternal. Later, we’re surprised to be in the same hotel and less surprised when we end up sharing the same bed for a night of the sort of exercise I’ve not experienced for some time this side of hot yoga, downward dog an’ all. My lips are sealed at this point; being nominated for a bad sex literary award would be humiliating enough were I writing fiction.

Was it was fun? Absolutely. Would I do it again? Certainly. Should I tell anyone? Definitely not.

Adam Golightly is a pseudonym

@MrAdamGolightly