We sat down together and looked at one another, both silent, overcome and dumbstruck by the occasion. After searching for so many years, I could not believe I was there, face to face with the author of the letter.

And so we talked. We spent the whole day together. All morning we talked, and Olivier, our intermediary, joined us for lunch. The mystery was solved. And though she would answer all my questions with a breath-taking, heart-breaking honesty and permit me to share them in this book, she begged that I keep her identity secret. She hadn’t written the letter for any kind of acknowledgement or discovery; on the contrary. But now that it had happened, the story could still become “une belle histoire”, a happy ending, but she insisted that her identity remain secret. I promised, and I dearly hope it does.

Conclusion

Conclusion

Meeting the unknown mother was an extraordinary and moving experience. She had become the mythical treasure pot at the end of the rainbow, a goal that one can never reach. She was just a fictional character in a book I had once written. It was a shock to meet a real live human being, a person who had suffered terribly, and perhaps was continuing to do so because of my insensitive search for her.

I was surprised that she was so amazed that someone had found her letter in a bottle. It was a letter: after all – a letter is usually written to be sent, written to be delivered, written to be read. She had seen the film Message in a Bottle, where the journalist finds the letters and publishes them in her newspaper, leading to huge press interest . . . Why had she been so surprised? Although I felt guilty and worried that I was re-opening healed wounds for her, I also felt that – especially given the context of the film that had clearly meant so much for her that she had included lines drawn from it in her letter – she should have expected that someone might find and read the letter.