‘What’s important is you now know you’re ready to ask those questions.’

Talking to Caroline helped, as it always had. That night, Eliza continued packing. At the bottom of her wardrobe, she found something she hadn’t looked at in some years. A folder of paperwork. Everything that had been in her mother’s bedside table. She’d looked through it so many times in the early months, desperate to find something new: a note to her, a new detail about her mother’s life. It was only a collection of bank statements, a letter from the council about an overdue parking fine, a note from the library to say the books she’d ordered had arrived. But among them were two special items. Her mother’s passport, filled with stamps from her travels around Europe. And, at the back of the folder, something that even all these years later gave her a dart of joy to see.

It was a stapled set of A4 pages. A school project Eliza had done the year she turned twelve, an assignment entitled ‘The Person I Admire Most in the World’. Most of her classmates had chosen footballers or cricketers. Two chose Mother Teresa. Eliza wasn’t the only student who chose her mother. But she was the only one who handed up a ten-page document, complete with handwritten notes, drawings, long captions and plenty of spelling mistakes.

It had taken three nights of questioning her mum to get the facts.

‘Stop joking, Mum,’ Eliza remembered saying. ‘This is serious.’

‘I couldn’t get more serious if I tried,’ Jeannie said with a studious expression. ‘So, where shall I begin? I was born in the Amazonian jungle, in a straw hut dangled over a precipice, to a soundtrack of monkey howls and toucan cries. Do toucans cry?’

‘Mum, stop it.’

Eventually, they got through the long list of questions suggested by the teacher.

Date and place of birth. ‘Darling, you already know my birthday. It happened in a hospital. I can’t recall the name. But it smelt of bleach, I do remember that.’

Names of parents. ‘Mum and Dad,’ Jeannie said.

‘But what were their names?’

‘I don’t know. That’s all I ever called them.’

Eliza sighed and wrote that down. ‘Any brothers or sisters?’

‘Alas, no. But we did have three cats. I thought of them as my sisters. Sisters with severe facial hair problems, but sisters nevertheless.’

‘Mum, this is serious.’

‘So was their facial hair. Go on, next question.’

Schooling. Her mum always made her boarding school sound like a cross between Hogwarts, Malory Towers and a haunted house. That night, Eliza wrote down Jeannie’s descriptions of evil teachers and midnight feasts. She also added a final line. My mum met her two best friends in the world at boarding school, which she said made up for the terrible food and inadequit teaching. Their names are Olivia and Maxine, but we call her Maxie.

Achievements. That one was easy. Eliza had always thought it was amazing that her Mum had gone travelling overseas at the age of nineteen, only seven years older than she was right now. With just a backpack. She’d written a full page about it.