“So how’s Ruth?” Mum asks before we hang up.

“She’s good, sends her love.”

“Things getting better between you two?” she asks hopefully, and for once I want to bring her good news.

“I think we’re getting there, Mum. I think we’re going to be OK.”

“I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear that, darling,” Mum says with a sigh before she yawns and I tell her to go back to bed and that I love her, and I hang up the phone.

Outside, the gulls are already circling in the pink sky. I can’t hear Maggie and the other volunteers anymore. Perhaps they’ve finally called it a night. I pour myself more coffee and type Mum’s username and password into the genealogy website. I don’t know exactly what I expect to find, but this missing birth certificate is all I have to go on. I type in Grace’s full name and her place of birth: Plymouth. But the search comes back with no results. I try just “Nichols” and “Plymouth” and now there are a couple of hundred results. I scroll down the first page—most of them are male—and am about to try a third and final search when the last entry catches my eye.

Name: Nichols, Zoe Grace Megan

Place of Birth: Derriford NHS Trust, Plymouth

Date of Birth: 10/09/1998

The first name and the year of birth are wrong—I’ve never known Grace to be called Zoe, and Grace is seventeen, born 10 September 2001, not 1998. But it’s too much of a coincidence to ignore. I lean in so close I can see each individual pixel. Under my glasses, I press my thumb and forefinger onto my eyelids and rub. I repeat my search—looking first for Grace Megan Nichols born in 2001. Again there are no results. Instead I search for Zoe Grace Megan Nichols born in 1998. One result.

It doesn’t make sense. Did Grace change her name? But why would she change her birthdate? If I’m right about this—and I think I am—then we were wrong. We were all wrong. We’ll never find seventeen-year-old Grace Megan Nichols because she doesn’t exist. But, according to these records, twenty-year-old Zoe Grace Megan Nichols does.

I sit, numb and mute, for an hour on the sofa, a film forming over my untouched coffee. I keep hearing Grace’s high-pitched, girlish voice in my head. She had always seemed young for her age, but that she’s an adult, not much younger than Cara, seems inconceivable. Why did Meg lie? And Simon—surely he’d know his daughter’s real name and age, why didn’t he raise the alarm? Perhaps they were both protecting Grace, keeping her in the pediatric system for as long as they could. Perhaps someone in the NHS made an administrative error and Meg and Simon realized that if they didn’t correct it Grace would get better care for longer? That makes sense, that I can understand. But what about Grace? Was she complicit, or did she never know her real name? Her real age? The questions are thick, heavy in my head, and when I try to pull them apart they seem to stretch and expand like toffee, making even less sense than they did before.