‘Good,’ he’d said reassuringly. ‘That all sounds fine. Finally, I need to assess your current mental state. We often find that people have very strong reactions to being given news about loved ones who’ve been missing for a sustained period, and the process of attempting a reintroduction can be fraught with difficulties and disappointments. That’s not a journey we recommend people embark upon unless they’re in a good place emotionally.’

Reintroduction. She hadn’t imagined it. He’d said the word. Her daughter was not just alive but was somewhere accessible and in a fit state to make contact. In that moment, she believed in everything. Karma, kismet, destiny, God, four-leafed clovers – the whole shebang. There was a reason she’d decided to blow money on a hotel room to end it all. There was a reason the housekeeping woman had come in at the worst – now the best – possible moment. The endless stretches in yoga had been worth every second of humiliation and fake smiles. The tranquillisers that had made her feel nauseous. The therapy where she’d poured out every sordid or boring detail of her life. They’d all led her here.

She crossed the room – just three steps, but her legs were jelly and she worried she might not make it – to pick up Alice’s photo from the windowsill. In it, her precious seven-year-old had just won a drawing competition. She’d had a real talent, certainly not inherited from Fenny. Drawing faces was what she’d been best at, spending hours of her young life at a table, getting through notepad after notepad.

Fenny still had some of those drawings tucked away in an envelope, hidden in a box with her wedding photos and Mother’s Day cards so dearly prized that she dared not take them out and handle them any more. Inside were the childish declarations of forever love that had become screams of hatred as drugs had made her daughter’s world a place where the only warm arms she welcomed were delusions that came from plastic wraps, and where only handing her money was enough to induce her to profess love.

‘Where is she?’ Fenny had whispered, the muscles in her face rising to produce an unfamiliar picture.

Smiles had been absent from her outlook for so long that forming one was an alien sensation.

‘I don’t know,’ the man said, ‘do you think you deserve to see her?’

Fenny’s smile drooped a little.

‘Deserve?’ she asked slowly. ‘Yes, of course, why would I not deserve to see my baby?’

‘Have you treasured your life, Fenella?’