The old monk nodded. ‘My mother came to visit me, long ago,’ he said quietly with a distant look on his face. ‘She said I had a daughter, Margarete, and a granddaughter, Shelly, and one day, when I was better, they would come here. They never came. I’ve been waiting so long. So long.’

‘Dear grandfather, I am Shelly. My mother would have come, but Gran Gertie died before she told anyone that she’d found you. I’m sorry, but my mother was killed in a car accident more than twenty years ago. Gran Gertie, your mother, told me so much about you. How you loved maths at school and that you became a great bridge builder. She said you were very handsome, like your father, Manno. I’m so pleased to meet you. Did you know, although your mother named you Adam, your father named you Hephaestus, blacksmith of the gods?’

He stared for a moment, and then smiled widely. ‘No, I didn’t know.’

‘Your father, Manno, sold his father’s fishing boat to the mayor of Kea and with the money, bought a ticket to England to see you just after your birth.’

‘Why didn’t they marry?’

‘Well, they sort of did marry, actually. It was their intention, and Manno did put a ring on her wedding finger, it was shaped like a dolphin. Wartime, and the distance between them, made everything difficult. When the mine injured Manno and he knew he wouldn’t live, he sent your mother a gold wedding ring, via carrier pigeon, and got the priest to write his wedding vows. He wrote a letter to you, too. Wait, I’ll read it to you.’ Suddenly overwhelmed, she turned to Harry. ‘I can hardly speak. Thank you. Can you pull up a tape on your phone? I think it’s side twenty.’

She sat on the edge of Adam’s bed and took his wrinkled hand in hers. ‘This is your mother’s voice, a few years before she died. Harry nodded and passed her his phone and she pressed play. They all listened.

‘We went to Syros for a holiday. This was because nobody minded where we went, apart from me. That island, and the one afternoon I spent there in the arms of my darling Manno, had shaped my life, so I wanted to return, one more time, before I died.

‘We all went to Syros, and it was on that holiday that I finally found my son, my precious Adam. I loved that boy so much, and wished things could have been different, but of course they could not. I had to do penance for my crimes because I did not want the sins of the mother to be passed onto her child. My boy was everything to me, and I pray I will see him in heaven one day.’