“You were nicer than I thought you’d be.”

“I was not being nice,” I said. “I had nothing to say.”

Sabrina laughed until she had to wipe her eyes, and then she stopped laughing, and by Brattleboro she said the thing she had gone up there to find out.

“I asked her about the name.”

I waited.

“My mother called me Sabrina. That’s what’s on the certificate — Sabrina Kean, that’s what I was born. And when I went into care at seven, the file had Sabrina on it, and the first placement had another girl called Sabrina, and somebody — a caseworker, Roberta thinks, or the first foster mother — started calling me Tessa.