I’m sorry, too, if all this is shocking. I’m sure it is. I can picture you reading it, becoming very still as you try to digest everything, and my heart breaks a bit that I’m not there to put an arm around you, to apologize for the body-blow this must feel like. You know I would rather have told you myself, in person, just the two of us having one of our good old chinwags. I’m sorry if you hate me for telling you like this. It’s just I thought: I can’t die and not say anything. I can’t pop my clogs and leave her with nothing; no clue, not so much as a name. So now you know. You do look like him, by the way. Better-looking, obviously – but that’s thanks to me.

Favourite girl, loveliest person, please know that this was written in love. And whenever you read this, I’ll be blowing kisses from afar, wishing you all the best things and all the happiness in the world.

Love Mum x

One letter, one single sheet of paper, and it had totally pulled the rug out from under Frankie’s feet. She’d felt angry at first – tricked into being told something she had insisted all along that she didn’t want to know. Then she’d felt sad, bereft for the loss of her beloved mother, whose voice and humour and love rang so clear and true through the handwritten words. Finally – eventually – she had felt maddened with curiosity, overwhelmed by the revelations. Those four half-siblings, for one thing. The fact that she looked like her father. Even, stupidly, the fact that she knew his name!

One letter, and it had been as explosive as a stick of dynamite. How could she write to this Harry Mortimer bloke, she had thought at the time, and her own letter not feel like a similar weapon? Hence the whole doomed northern road-trip, which had only served to convince her that a letter probably would have been a better introduction, after all. She would try again, she had decided now, make a better fist of things this time, apologize if she’d wrecked his party. And if he didn’t respond, then so be it. At least she would have given it a go.