He looks so contrite that I have to laugh.

‘You know, that ring never was my mother’s,’ I say. ‘Well, it was, but not my adoptive mother’s. It was Bonnie’s all along – she gave it to Anna to give to me.’

‘Maybe that’s why you didn’t need it any more,’ he suggests. ‘Because after that day, you had Bonnie herself. You had the real thing.’

‘You know,’ I tell him, still fingering my necklace in delight, ‘I have been thinking a lot about what I really need lately. I was only a child when I found out that I was adopted, and it became so intrinsic to who I was, and who I became as I grew up. I’m ashamed to admit it now, but I was such a victim. I wrote myself into this role as a forgotten, abandoned child, and it warped me. David knew it, and I guess that’s why he created all those Evangeline stories in the first place, in order to show me that a person is only defined by their actions, rather than their situation. Whenever I was acting up or being resentful, he would ask me what Evangeline would do, and I hated it, because I knew that she was better than me, and less bitter than me. But all he was really trying to do was chivvy me out of my self-pity. I should have followed Evangeline’s lead, but instead I retreated into the shadows, and it took coming here, and meeting Tui and Bonnie and –’ I pause – ‘you, actually, to make me realise what I really needed.’

‘And what was that?’ Kit asks, his voice low.

‘Me,’ I say simply. ‘I just needed to be me.’

Kit smiles at that, and for a moment or two, neither of us says anything, content to simply take in the scenery and close our eyes against a re-emerging sun.

‘Thank you so much for this, by the way,’ I say, turning to look at him again, enjoying the sensation of simply seeing him there. I pick the necklace up off my chest, tracing my thumb around the spiral shape of the koru symbol. ‘I can’t think of a better present – there is literally nothing better that you could have given me.’

Kit looks amused.

‘Nothing?’ he says, tilting his head to one side. ‘Nothing at all?’

‘You still haven’t told me,’ I say, talking to mask how thrown I am by the potential meaning behind his words, ‘why you’re here – and why we’re on the top of this hill.’

‘I used to come up here with my pa,’ he says, so wistfully that it douses any vestiges of my imagined flirtation. ‘We would sit here for hours, watching the clouds drift by, and he would tell me all the old Maori stories, trying his best to instil in me all the wisdom that he had learned from his own father.’