It is a single sheet. Her chest tightens as she sees the address of a local solicitors’ office. She devours the words too quickly, before they have chance to sink in and before she can digest them. Her heart is hammering as she forces herself to slow down and return to the beginning with its innocuous pleasantry Dear Mrs Ellison. Yet even on a second reading, her mind swims with confusion.

‘Gwen.’

Jack eases the door open. The letter quivers in her hand.

‘Gwen?’

She senses his approach. Tom’s voice drifts faintly from the kitchen; pans clang; in the yard the cockerel crows. She feels Jack’s solid presence close behind her and part of her longs to sink against him, for him to scaffold her as he had all those years before. But those days, she knows, are long past, and she has no right to impose on him. Instead, she holds out the letter.

‘I don’t understand.’ Her voice is like a breeze through a cracked pane of glass as she releases the letter to his custody.

‘He wants blood samples?’

‘Can he make us do that?’

‘From this it’s unclear whether it’s a legal demand or a polite request.’

‘What if he can?’

‘I don’t know enough about the law, lass, to say whether he can or not. I think it’s time we sought some professional advice.’

‘Oh God, Jack … what if he can take him?’

‘I won’t let that happen.’ Setting the letter upon the desk, Jack grips the tops of her arms and peers into her anxious eyes. ‘And I’m prepared to do whatever it takes to make sure it doesn’t.’

Over the years, Gwen has come to know shame well. She has, at times, been intimately acquainted with it. She has borne its burn, nursed its pain, hidden its bruises. But in the elegant first-floor office of a converted Georgian townhouse on Helvedon high street, shame claims her anew, and she wonders if she has the strength to bear it.

She sits before the walnut desk of the senior partner of McVickers, Courtney and Cox. Giles Courtney is younger than she had expected, a man of middling years, cursed by a receding hairline but blessed with a cheerful demeanour. He had welcomed her and Jack into his office with a broad smile and firm handshakes, and now the two of them await his verdict with anxious anticipation. He scans the contents of the letter, having listened stony-faced to Gwen’s faltering account of its background. Her cheeks had burned with humiliation as she stumbled over a selective version of events.

He finishes reading and pulls a face, then allows the letter to drop onto the inlaid leather top of his neatly arranged desk. Drawing in a deep breath, he unhooks his wire-framed glasses.