‘Yes, jeez!’ she exclaims in a high-pitched screech, making me laugh. This girl never fails to gild even my gloomiest clouds with silver.

Beavis is busily licking his mistress’s feet now, which I have just noticed are bare.

‘Tui,’ I remark in mock-horror. ‘Where are your shoes and socks?’

‘I don’t know!’ she says, bellowing with laughter.

I should convince her to go back down into the yard and find Kit, in case he’s worried, but a selfish part of me wants to keep her here with me. The moments that I thought I had lost her were some of the worst of my life, and now it’s taking all my powers of self-control not to pull her furiously into my arms and never let her go again.

Tui seems charmingly unfazed by the morning’s misadventure, and is now picking hay seeds out of my hair like a chimpanzee and flicking them into the air. If only I could stay up here with her forever, in a bubble of untroubled happiness.

‘Whose little piggies are those that I spy?’ calls a voice from below.

While I immediately tense up, Tui starts laughing helplessly, wiggling her toes to taunt Bonnie, who I can now see making her way up to join us.

‘I assume these are yours?’ she says, thrusting a pair of grubby, rainbow-striped socks towards us.

Tui nods in delight, pursing her lips together and giggling like Muttley from Wacky Races. Bonnie, who is almost level with us now, reaches across a hand and tickles Tui’s bare feet, causing her to shriek and fall into me.

‘Help me, Genie!’ she cries. ‘Oh no – Mummy’s trying to get me!’

‘Genie can’t help you,’ Bonnie says warningly, but her expression is all warmth. ‘If I want to eat your bare toes, then nobody can stop me!’

Tui jumps up so fast that she cracks her head on one of the wooden beams, and without thinking, I leap up to see if she’s OK.

‘Silly donkey,’ Bonnie says from Tui’s other side, rubbing her daughter’s head. ‘You know I wouldn’t really eat your feet.’

She catches my eye as she speaks, and this time I find that I can hold her gaze. Now that I’m closer to her, I realise that her features are, in fact, much more like Tui’s than my own, and the resemblance catches me off guard. I had been so ready to judge my real mother, but during these past weeks where I have essentially lived inside her life, I have come to understand and appreciate that she is more than simply a woman who chose to give me away – she is also the person who raised Tui.

The three of us sit back down and Bonnie hands Tui her socks, telling her to get them back on before she steps in some dung.