Dante's Story: The Baby
The Morning Everything Changes
The novel opens on one of the most significant days of Dante Bridgeman's life: the morning of his A-level results. At seventeen, Dante has a clear vision of his future. He wants to study journalism at university — a goal that feels within reach as he waits for the envelope that will confirm his place. His younger brother Adam narrates the opening passages in parallel, and the dual narration is Blackman's central structural device: two brothers, two sets of preoccupations, one household about to be shaken by the same shock.
Dante's results are good. For a brief moment, the future he planned seems confirmed. Then the doorbell rings.
Melanie Arrives
At the door is Melanie, known as Mel — Dante's ex-girlfriend, with whom he split up approximately a year earlier. She is not alone. She has arrived with a baby girl in a pushchair. The baby — named Emma — is approximately ten months old. She cannot yet walk, but she is alert, responsive, and old enough to have a developing personality. Dante is stunned.
Melanie tells Dante that Emma is his daughter. The timeline adds up: their relationship ended while Melanie was pregnant, though she has kept this from him entirely. Dante had no knowledge of the pregnancy. He has missed the first ten months of his child's life — not through choice, but through deception.
Emma arrives in a pushchair and is approximately ten months old. She is not a newborn. Blackman chose this age deliberately: Emma is old enough to have needs and reactions, but young enough that Dante — who knows nothing about babies — finds her completely overwhelming.
The Deception and the Disappearance
Melanie does not announce that she is leaving for good. Her method of abandonment is deceptive, and the deception is what makes it so devastating. She asks Dante to look after Emma while she pops out — the implication is that she will return. She does not return. Later, she sends a text message telling Dante that she will not be coming back.
There is no dramatic confrontation at the door, no tearful goodbye, no conversation about what happens next. Melanie exits his life as quietly as possible, leaving Dante with Emma and no instruction, no preparation, and no support beyond his family. The casual brutality of a text message — not even a phone call — encapsulates Melanie's refusal to take accountability.
Had Melanie been honest about not wanting to return, Dante could have chosen how to respond. Instead she removes his agency. He is left in a situation not of his choosing, with a child he has known for one afternoon, unable to contact the mother, and unsure whether this is permanent. Blackman uses this to underline one of the novel's recurring themes: men can be the primary carers, whether they choose to be or not. Dante's journey into fatherhood begins not with a decision but with a deception.
Dante's First Response
Dante's initial reaction is shock. He does not immediately bond with Emma, nor does he immediately reject her. He is simply at a loss. He does not know how to hold her, how to soothe her, what she needs, or what he is supposed to do. The novel is honest about the learning curve: parenting is not instinctive for Dante. It is learned, slowly and sometimes painfully, over the course of the novel.
His father, Tyler — a widower who raised Dante and Adam alone after losing his wife to cancer — plays a crucial role in the early stages. Tyler's response to Emma is important: he does not condemn Dante. He accepts the situation and helps with the practicalities, modelling the same kind of stoic parental responsibility that has defined his own life. Blackman uses Tyler to show that single fatherhood is not extraordinary — it is what men in this family do.
The boys' mother died of cancer. Tyler has raised Dante and Adam as a widower. This is not an abandonment story — it is a family shaped by grief. Tyler's emotional guardedness stems from unprocessed loss, not bitterness at being left.
University Plans Collapse
Dante had planned to study journalism at university. This ambition is not vague — it is specific and carefully chosen. Within hours of receiving his results, that plan is in ruins. He cannot leave Emma with no one to care for her. He cannot go to university and take a baby. His academic achievement, the thing he has worked towards for two years, becomes meaningless in a single afternoon.
Blackman is deliberate about naming Dante's subject. Journalism is not a trivial aspiration — it is a career built on telling the truth, investigating the world, giving people a voice. The irony is that Dante is now silenced by his circumstances. His story, for the moment, is not one he can tell publicly. He is not the correspondent he wanted to become. He is a teenage father in his dad's house, learning to warm a bottle.
Critics have noted that Dante's career aspiration is meaningful within the novel's structure. Both boys are co-narrators — they tell their own stories in their own voices. In a sense, they are both already journalists of their own experience. Dante's voice is direct, practical, and observational. His frustrated dream becomes part of what he has to rebuild by the novel's end: a sense of a future that includes both Emma and the version of himself he was going to become.
The Dual-Narration Structure
Lesson 2 is also the right moment to consolidate understanding of Blackman's structural choice. The novel alternates between Dante's first-person chapters and Adam's first-person chapters. Each brother sees only his own crisis clearly; neither is fully aware of the other's. Dante is consumed by Emma. Adam is consumed by his own story — his relationship with Josh, his experiences at school, his sense of isolation.
The dual narration creates dramatic irony. We, as readers, see both boys struggling simultaneously. We understand the pressure building in the household before either brother fully articulates it. This technique also makes the novel's climax — when the two storylines violently converge — all the more powerful.