"No," I said, and I meant it. "Not at all."

"Lovely," said Frank. "Let's get coffee and get to work."

It took me a minute to realize that that was it: I was in. I'd been expecting a three-hour interview and a stack of weird tests with inkblots and questions about my mother, but Frank doesn't work like that. I still don't know where, along the way, he made the decision. For a long time, I waited for the right moment to ask him. Now I'm not sure, any more, whether I want to know what he saw in me; what it was that told him I would be good at this.

We got burnt-tasting coffee and a packet of chocolate biscuits from the canteen, and spent the rest of the day coming up with Alexandra Madison. I picked the name--"You'll remember it better that way," Frank said. Madison, because it sounds enough like my own surname to make me turn around, and Lexie because when I was a kid that was the name of my imaginary sister. Frank found a big sheet of paper and drew a timeline of her life for me. "You were born in Holles Street Hospital on the first of March 1979. Father, Sean Madison, a minor diplomat, posted in Canada--that's so we can pull you out fast if we need to: give you a family emergency, and off you go. It also means you can spend your childhood traveling, to explain why nobody knows you." Ireland is small; everyone's cousin's girlfriend went to school with you. "We could make you foreign, but I don't want you fucking about with an accent. Mother, Caroline Kelly Madison. She got a job?"

"She's a nurse."

"Careful. Think faster; keep an eye out for implications. Nurses need a new license for every country. She trained, but she quit working when you were seven and your family left Ireland. Want brothers and sisters?"

"Sure, why not," I said. "I'll have a brother." There was something intoxicating about this. I kept wanting to laugh, just at the lavish giddy freedom of it: relatives and countries and possibilities spread out in front of me and I could pick whatever I wanted, I could grow up in a palace in Bhutan with seventeen brothers and sisters and a personal chauffeur if I felt like it. I shoved another biscuit into my mouth before Frank could see me smiling and think I wasn't taking this seriously.

"Whatever your heart desires. He's six years younger, so he's in Canada with your parents. What's his name?"

"Stephen." Imaginary brother; I had an active fantasy life as a kid.

"Do you get on with him? What's he like? Faster," Frank said, when I took a breath.

"He's a little smart-arse. Football-mad. He fights with our parents all the time, because he's fifteen, but he still talks to me . . ."

Sun slanting across the scarred wood of the desk. Frank smelled clean, like soap and leather. He was a good teacher, a wonderful teacher; his black Biro scribbled in dates and places and events, and Lexie Madison developed out of nothing like a Polaroid, she curled off the page and hung in the air like incense smoke, a girl with my face and a life from a half-forgotten dream. When did you have your first boyfriend? Where were you living? What was his name? Who dumped who? Why? Frank found an ashtray, flipped a Player's out of his packet for me. When the sun bars slid off the desk and the sky started to dim outside the window, he spun his chair around, took a bottle of whiskey off a shelf and spiked our coffees: "We've earned it," he said. "Cheers."