Chloe nods, while Maureen goes to sit next to Patrick. She tells herself to focus on the glass, to let them do the talking, to convince her. That’s what she needs them to do. She breathes into the glass.

‘I mean, you said yourself that you were adopted, that you didn’t really know your background,’ Maureen says. ‘I mean, didn’t you say you were around four or five?’

Chloe nods, thinking back to that conversation, to the seed that she had planted all those weeks ago that had somehow grown into this.

‘I mean, do you have any memories at all of before that? Anything?’ Maureen asks.

Chloe looks up at the ceiling. She thinks of the boxes of toys in the spare room, how familiar some of them had been. She doesn’t tell them that, though. She needs them to convince her. That’s how this needs to go.

‘I don’t know, maybe, some things . . . maybe.’

‘Listen, we’re not saying this is definite,’ Patrick says. ‘Maybe we’ve got it wrong, maybe—’

‘We don’t think so, though, Chloe,’ Maureen interrupts. ‘There are too many coincidences: the way you look, your colouring, your background, the fact that your grandma was from the same area . . .’

Chloe reaches her hand up. It is shaking. Humans are pattern-seeking beings; they like symmetry; they like stars to align. She stares back at Maureen and Patrick across the room, sees how much this mother wants to be right. She’ll ignore any facts that don’t add up, taking only the ones that do. That’s how horoscopes work – people only listen to what they want to hear. Every day we walk around with a fine filter that discards all evidence to the contrary of what we want to believe. She looks at these two parents, lost for nearly three decades – what we need to believe.

‘I’m sorry,’ Chloe says. ‘It’s all a bit of a shock, you know?’

‘Of course it is,’ Maureen says, and it’s at this point that she crosses the room to sit next to Chloe on the sofa. She takes her hands in her own, examining the shape of them, as if searching for anything similar to her own.

‘We’re not expecting you to agree,’ Maureen says, ‘and we might be wrong, Chloe, but imagine if we’re not, imagine if you are our daughter.’

Maureen takes her hands in her own and holds them against her chest. She looks into Chloe’s eyes and finds the recognition she seeks there. Her eyes saying, Imagine if it were true.

Patrick interrupts. ‘I mean, we’ll know for sure, eventually, like.’

Maureen turns towards him. ‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, technology, it’s moved on, hasn’t it? Since our Angie was . . . well, they have all sorts now, DNA testing and—’

She drops Chloe’s hands. ‘Patrick, you still think I don’t know, don’t you?’