Suki grimly stuck it out at the Baton Rouge café with Sweaty Stefan for a little while longer while she tried to digest it all. She pondered on the lie that had been her life, and thought of that bitch who had casually thrown her out with the trash. Then Stefan started in with the chocolates and flowers, and she thought, Am I going to settle for this? Am I really going to sleep with this dickhead and probably marry him and have his kids?

No. She wasn’t.

She was still in shock over what she’d read in Aunt Ginny’s note. Her kindly aunt had written it nicely, tried to soften the blow, but what it amounted to was this: her whole life up to this point had been nothing but bullshit. Her real mother hadn’t been a teacher, her real father hadn’t been a carpenter. Dave and Jo Vance weren’t her parents at all. No – her real mother was up in New York, fancy-free and untroubled by the loathsome kid she couldn’t wait to kick aside.

Suki didn’t tell a soul except Felice that she was going. Fuck Stefan. She made her plans, then one day she locked up the trailer and got on the Greyhound bus and headed north. She was looking to hunt down this cold-hearted bitch called Claire Milo, who had dumped her as a baby on the Sisters of Mercy, and left her to fend alone.

‘Thanks for goin’ Greyhound!’ the driver said as she and the other passengers shuffled off the bus after the long and exhausting journey. Over a thousand miles she’d travelled, passing through Alabama, Virginia, Maryland, and now here she was. New York. The Big Apple!

Already, Suki was missing Felice. But she’d made preparations for this trip, and she was planning to take her time over it. She had a Brooklyn apartment lined up, and a job; everything was in place so that she could settle here and spy out the land, track down that witch who’d abandoned her and give her a piece of her mind. All she had to do was go along to the real estate agent and collect the apartment key. Then she was going to visit that whore, who clearly didn’t have a clue about what it meant to be a real mother.