The sky above the lake is part obscured today by a swell of donkey-grey clouds, the sunshine subdued for once behind them. Crunching underfoot, the shore is nature’s button box of colourful stones, interrupted at regular intervals by tree roots, bursts of emerald-green mountain grass and untamed thickets of wild flora in radiant yellows and harmonious mauves.

I walk along slowly, sipping coffee and breaking off pieces of muffin, my tatty old Converse finding easy purchase on pebbles long since softened by tides. Gnarled trees bend over like crooked old ladies, caressing the water with their fingers of fronds, and I smile at a black dog as it splashes through the shallows, a stick almost as long as me clamped triumphantly between its jaws. Red and orange kayaks litter the shore, their oars poking up like diffuser sticks, and further along, small wooden rowing boats lounge belly up like sunbathers, displaying cracked patches of paint that were once perhaps white.

There is a rawness here in Wanaka that is absent in the more polished Queenstown, and as such the beauty feels more authentic somehow, less intrusive – a morning after rather than the night before, a place where dust settles rather than being kicked up.

I could not have chosen a better location to stop for a while in order to think.

I came to New Zealand in search of my mother, but instead, I have found a sister. And I met Kit, too. I am not sure what to call him. Certainly, he has become someone I consider to be a friend – but will that still be the case when Bonnie returns, and Kit finds out who I really am? Any day now, Kit said – any day now I will finally have to face the woman who chose to give me away. I could have grown up surrounded by all of this, but because of her, I am only just discovering it now.

I watch a flock of birds sweep out across the water, their little bodies gliding in perfect harmony, unknowing skywriters as they soar first up and then down. How lucky they are to belong to one another; how simple it must be to fall in line and become part of something far bigger than yourself. David would argue with that notion if he were here – my adoptive father would tell me that being an individual is far more important, and that one person can harness just as much power as a thousand if they so choose. That may be true of some, but not of me. I’m tired of being the only one. I do better with other people around me – and it is here in New Zealand, more than anywhere else since I lost Anna, that I feel as if I really belong. If I go home, will I lose that feeling? Will I be alone again?