I finally dragged myself off the bed and sat cross-legged on the floor in front of my bedroom mirror. My eyes were so swollen I could barely see. In my head, I replayed the moment Mother had slapped me and told myself I should be relieved she wasn’t my real mother. A real mother wouldn’t do the things she had done to me. A real mother wouldn’t tell their daughter they were dying when they weren’t. Yet loss wedged itself in my chest, stubborn as a nail, and refused to budge. I had lost the only mother I had ever known. I had lost my real parents, and they had lost me. They had lost me when ‘Mother’ had taken me away. But why? Why had she taken me from my real parents? Why? Why? Why?

The question was on repeat in my head, circling and circling and circling, like the vicious hornet that got trapped in the cottage one summer. It didn’t make any sense. I felt like I was going mad. But she was the mad one. She was the one who didn’t make sense. People didn’t take other people’s children. It was wrong. It was worse than wrong. It was crazy and not something a human being did. People were supposed to have their own children and then look after them themselves, not steal someone else’s baby.

From my books I knew that animals didn’t take other animals’ young. Lions didn’t take other lions’ cubs. Even cats, who could be sly and mean and liked to kill other animals for fun, never stole other cats’ kittens. It went completely against nature. Just like someone living shut up behind boarded windows for their whole life.

I’d also read about cuckoos – birds who liked to lay their own eggs in other birds’ nests and then abandon their own babies. They did something stranger too, which was to make their eggs turn the same colour as their victims’ eggs. They were experts in copying the eggs of their chosen target. The nastiest fact of all was that when the cuckoo chick was born, the mother cuckoo threw the other birds’ eggs and chicks out of the nest, so that her own baby would be better fed by its new mother. It was cruel and selfish and crazy. When I had first read about cuckoos I’d cried for the mummy bird and her poor unborn – or only just born – babies. Now, sitting on the floor in front of the mirror, I cried for myself. I also cried for Emma.