‘Genie went to find you the day after she arrived,’ David explained, levering himself on to the stool opposite her own. ‘Someone told her you’d come here, but she decided to stay and wait for you to return.’

‘What a bloody mess.’ Bonnie was shaking her head now in disbelief. ‘I mean, what are the chances that, after all this time, we try to find each other at exactly the same bloody time?’

‘Where have you been since you arrived?’ David enquired.

‘I came to see Evangeline,’ Bonnie said. ‘But when I landed, I couldn’t make myself come here. I was terrified, and I needed some more time to get my thoughts in order, so I went to stay with Tracey.’

‘Sunrise Tracey?’ he exclaimed, and Bonnie smiled for the first time.

‘The very same.’

‘Gosh! How is she?’

Bonnie filled him in, explaining how she had come to learn about Anna’s accident.

‘Of course.’ David sipped his tea. ‘Tracey never knew my surname, did she? She used to call me “The Professor”.’

‘I can’t even begin to imagine how awful it’s been for you,’ she said in a small voice. ‘For both of you.’ Bonnie fiddled with the cuffs of her thick winter coat, which she had yet to remove. Despite the artificial heat in the kitchen, she still felt chilled right through to her bones.

‘Genie took it very badly,’ David said, rubbing at his eyes so rigorously that his glasses fell right off. ‘It was my idea that she fly over and try to find you – I thought that perhaps it would help. I should have written or called, but like you, I was afraid that you would refuse to see her. We never wanted to close that door completely, and I’m ashamed that Anna and I allowed it to happen. Annabel was so bowled over by love for Evangeline, and she used to worry herself into a fury imagining that you would come back one day to claim her. In the end, I guess it became easier to distance ourselves. But Genie always knew that she had a mum somewhere – we never lied to her about the adoption.’

‘Did she never ask to see her original birth certificate?’ Bonnie asked, because she knew that if it were her, she would have peered under every pebble in the world until she found out the truth.

‘Quite the opposite,’ David admitted, staring resolutely down at his moccasin-style slippers. ‘We told her there were no adoption papers because you were a friend of a friend, and that it was easier to simply put Anna’s name down as her mother and my name as her father to avoid the headache and expense of going through official channels.’

‘And she believed you?’

David shrugged. ‘I guess she did – she asked me once about who her real father was, but I simply told her we didn’t know.’