‘Will you stay? I mean, I’m sorry we can’t offer you longer. Once the kids are at school there won’t be any need, since we can put them in after-school club. But if you want to stay and find another job as an English teacher, at an international school perhaps, I could help you look.’ She pauses. ‘Or maybe you’d want another position in a family, like this. Less stressful than in a school, I imagine.’ She smiles, and I catch the condescending undertone to her words: you obviously have no career ambition, unlike me. But I won’t rise to it.

‘I haven’t decided yet,’ I say.

She’s not on Facebook. So I either need to think of an excuse to ask when her birthday is or find out another way. I think her age was stated on her marriage certificate, but I can’t remember what it said. Maybe I’ll have to go in there again and look.

I think of Jorge’s anger, the platitudes I gave him. No more snooping, I promise. But things are different now.

‘Things have been a little tricky for me lately. I need to make a fresh start, but I’m still figuring out what that should be.’

‘Oh,’ she frowns. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ She takes a sip of her drink and then cocks her head, smiles. ‘It’s never too late to start over, though, is it?’

I smile, thinking of the several failed rounds of IVF, the years of trying and failing, another rod on the back of our marriage when it clearly wasn’t strong enough. I think of Patrick’s email and my approaching fortieth birthday in the autumn, and I think that, yes, for some things it is too late. But she doesn’t know how that feels since everything’s been so easy for her.

‘Well,’ I say. ‘Here would be a good place to try. I can see it’s wonderful to live here. You’re very lucky.’

‘Yes, we are,’ she says. ‘But in a way you make your own luck, don’t you?’

Sometimes, I think. And other times things just happen to you that you have absolutely no control over. I wonder what it would feel like to tell her. To tell her she isn’t who she thinks she is, that her parents aren’t her own, that she wasn’t meant to have this lucky, lucky life. But if I inflicted that pain on her, then I’d be inflicting far worse on myself, because if she was the other daughter then I’d have another question, a question I don’t think I’d want to know the answer to: would Mum and Dad have preferred her – this ambitious, beautiful, sorted woman who’s managed to have it all – instead of me?