At my divorce hearing the judge ruled I’d leave with nothing. My husband leaned down and told me to see how long I’d last. Then the courtroom doors went.

I have four memories of that woman and two of them are probably not real.

There was nobody.

Not a figure of speech. No grandparents living. No aunt, no cousin, nothing on either side that anybody could find in four months of looking.

I went into care eleven days after that funeral.

Severin Marrow was forty-five in 2001 and he had been married to Ilse Marrow since 1984.

He did not know about me when I was born. I believe that.

I have been through every page of section one twice, with a lawyer, and there is nothing anywhere in it that suggests otherwise, and I went looking for it on purpose.

He found out in the March of 2009.

From a letter sent to him by a solicitor dealing with what was left of my mother’s estate — three years after she died, because that is how long it took somebody to get to the bottom of a box.