‘I know, love, but . . .’ Lorna bit her lip. She was too overcome with happiness right now to go near any recriminations. It was as if she didn’t dare jinx this extraordinary news by allowing negative feelings to invade. ‘Olivia was very young, though. It must have been such a hard decision for her, what with having lost Aidan and . . . Look, she’s told us now anyway, hasn’t she? And that can’t have been easy.’

‘Yes, well, bully for her. But she could have considered our feelings before, couldn’t she? Just because she didn’t want to deal with the consequences didn’t mean . . .’ He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. ‘We could have had him,’ he said savagely. ‘Rather than give him up to be adopted, we could have had him!’

‘Roy, we can’t think like that,’ Lorna said helplessly, although now that he had said these words, it was hard to ignore them. She too was picturing them building train-sets with Aidan’s little boy, finger-painting in the kitchen with him, playing football in the garden. The house mocked them with its emptiness. All the memories that could have been. How she would have doted on that child.

‘Can’t we?’ Roy replied. ‘Well, I do. Because she didn’t think of us for a moment when she robbed us of the chance to know our grandchild, did she? That’s nineteen years of his life gone, which we’ll never get back.’

‘I know, but . . .’ She reminded herself of Olivia back then as a teenager: a quiet, polite girl, with a wariness about her that told Lorna she took nothing for granted. Olivia had not had an easy life, growing up; she didn’t have the secure sort of background that could have coped with an unexpected pregnancy thrown into the mix. They had to take that into account, remember that she must have been devastated and despairing. They had all been! ‘I’m not sure we’d have been up to the job of looking after a baby at the time,’ she said slowly. ‘We were in pieces ourselves, remember. I was, anyway.’ She pictured herself unmoving in the bed, a silent mound of unhappiness. Maybe she’d have been able to drag herself up to look after a small motherless baby, but grief had numbed her for a long time. Realistically, it might well have been too much for her, she knew. Perhaps it was only right that the baby had grown up somewhere devoid of tragedy, at least in those early years. She patted her husband’s hand. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s be positive. We’ll find him and we’ll make up for lost time. Well, I’m going to anyway. If you want to sit and sulk, then that’s your lookout.’