That I had looked at Nora’s face in a terminal and known.

That asking for a test was letting my mother’s version into the room.

Evelyn’s position, which she held without raising her voice for about forty minutes, was this.

“You are going to have to go into rooms with lawyers in them for the next year.

Some of those rooms will have your mother’s lawyer in them.

And the first thing anybody on the other side is going to do is put a question mark next to whether these are your children, because it costs them nothing and it costs me everything.

“I have been carrying nine unopened letters and an uncashed cheque for six years because I understood that.