‘What?’ I cry. ‘You can’t say that. You can’t regret Bonnie.’ The tightness inside me squeezes harder until every muscle in my body is clenched. I’d thought I wanted him to show remorse, but now I know it’s not what I want to hear. ‘You can’t tell me you wish you didn’t have her?’

‘No. I don’t know,’ he cries. ‘It was wrong. It was so wrong, and your mum could never see it.’

‘But you must have made the decision together,’ I say angrily. ‘You can’t blame it all on Mum.’

I want him to defend what they did, not regret it. I want to hear him tell me they had no choice because they loved Bonnie and they wanted to give her a better life. I don’t want to listen to him snivelling down the phone at me that they should never have taken her.

‘Of course we did. Of course we did,’ he repeats, more quietly.

‘So why did you?’ I plead. ‘Tell me why you did it, Dad.’

‘We were young and desperate for a family. And your mother had lost two babies and we thought— We thought we couldn’t have our own. I love Bonnie. You know that.’ He pauses. ‘But we shouldn’t have done it.

‘Does Bonnie know?’ he asks.

‘Not yet,’ I snap. And I’ll be the one to tell her, won’t I, Dad? It should have been you but neither of you could do it.

My fingers tingle from where I’m gripping the phone. Blood races through my veins, heating my skin. I’m angry that I won’t get what I now realise I want from him. I wanted what Ruth had given me – a refusal to believe they’d done anything wrong. A conviction I think I’d have seen in Mum.

‘It wasn’t your mother.’ Dad is sobbing into the phone. ‘I was the one who told the girl what we’d done.’

‘Oh God—’ I start as Olivia’s voice breaks in.

‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ she says, and I realise I’ve lost him.

‘Nothing’s going on,’ I snap as I hang up the phone.

Only now do I see snatches of my parents’ relationship for what it was. I can picture them sitting in front of me as I draw a portrait of their marriage and it’s clear they could never have moved past what happened.

They’d done something they never agreed on. That made Dad tear himself apart with guilt to the point he admitted it to Iona, while Mum tried her best to hold us together. They didn’t stand a chance of survival in the end.

Ten minutes later my doorbell pierces the silence. I expect it to be Bonnie and pull on a jumper before opening the door, but it’s Detective Harwood.