She nodded at the flowers. ‘I’ll just pop these in the sink, you can get in the car.’ She lifted the car keys off the coat hooks by the door and tossed them to him. Two minutes later, she was beside him, pulling off towards The Rose and Crown.

They found a quiet corner, and DJ bought them each a pint of shandy. She watched him at the bar, he could have been his father. She wanted to weep.

‘There must be so many things you want to know, and I promise I’ll answer all your questions. But this is very hard, for me too, because . . . well . . . first I lost my mother, then your father. Then, I lost you. In a way, I also lost my own father at that time too, you see?’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘I didn’t want to give you up. It was terrible. I was too young to stand up for myself with everyone pressuring me. And all these things happened in one tragic year that started when I was sixteen and my mother was killed in an accident. I never fully recovered. So please, I hope you’ll forgive me if I sound bitter, or selfish, I’m not . . . not really; it’s just that I am still hurting. There’s so much love and loss and pain involved, DJ, I’ll probably embarrass you on more than one occasion by bursting into tears.’ She gazed at him, her son. ‘But now, oh my God, I can’t believe this – I just can’t – I’m overwhelmed.’ She pulled in a ragged breath.

He lowered his eyes from her face to the table, digested her words and nodded. ‘You’ve had a hard time. I’ve often tried to imagine why you gave me up . . . why you didn’t want me . . .’

‘Please stop right there. There has never been one single moment when I didn’t want you. I let you go to a new family, parents who I understood loved you as much as I did. They did, didn’t they?’ Shelly peered at him with a worried frown.

He nodded and smiled gently, but she sensed his unease.

‘It was the right thing to do, for your sake. My father said, if I loved you, I would want you to have a better life than any seventeen-year-old single mother without an income could give you.’

‘So, it was your father that forced you to give me up.’

Shelly nodded. ‘It took many years before I stopped hating him for it. In the end, I realised he was right. I gave you up because I loved you so much. Not because I didn’t want you.’ She realised tears were trickling down her cheeks and dabbed them away with a tissue. ‘Sorry,’ she said with a smile. ‘I did warn you. Please tell me – you have had a good life, haven’t you?’