Kit puts his head on one side. He appears to be sizing me up, deciding whether or not I can be trusted with an answer. I feel too scrutinised to meet his gaze, so I stare instead at the lettering on his shirt. I hadn’t noticed before that the ‘O’ of ‘Koru’ is a spiral shape, while the ‘K’ has been shaped to look like a horse rearing up on its hind legs.

‘To tell you the truth,’ Kit continues, ‘Bon didn’t actually give me a reason as such – just told me she had something important to do and asked me to keep an eye on Tui.’

‘Right,’ I say, distracted. Kit shifts his boots through the dirt.

‘Are you feeling all right there?’ he asks as I sway to the right. ‘Come on, let’s get out of this heat, yeah?’

I follow him over to the shed-cum-office, keeping my eyes on his back rather than the nearby horses.

‘Here.’ Kit takes a can of Coke out of a small glass-fronted fridge and passes it to me.

‘Sit if you like,’ he adds, gesturing to a battered yellow sofa that has been pushed up against the wall.

I do as he says and sit down, while Kit perches on the edge of a wide wooden desk, folding his arms across his chest once again and looking at me in the same way Anna used to look at the cryptic crossword in the Sunday paper.

‘Thanks,’ I murmur after a moment, cracking open my drink and taking one sip, then another. I find that I’m very thirsty, and the sweetness of the cola brings me back to myself a bit.

‘Sorry,’ I say, ‘I’m not usually like this. You must think that I’m a right weirdo.’

I try a smile, and he follows suit, unfolding his tattooed arms and sticking his hands deep into the pockets of his shorts.

‘Bonnie knew me a long time ago, when I was a child,’ I blunder on, wondering as I say it why I feel the need to explain myself to this man – this total stranger. Perhaps it’s because there is an aura of kindness surrounding Kit, and for reasons I don’t completely understand, I feel as if I can trust him. Just not enough to tell him the whole truth, of course.

‘She knew my parents,’ I tell him, the need to embellish my story fuelled by his silence. ‘That’s how I got this address, and I just, you know, thought it might be nice to surprise her with a visit.’

Kit takes this in, a slight frown casting lines across his forehead, and I wonder how much he knows. Is Bonnie the sort of woman who would be open about her past? Would she confess to giving up her own child?