‘Sorry, I’ve got to go now,’ I say, and I stand up and run out of the club.

The feeling of lightness I briefly achieved in the jazz club trickles away throughout Friday, and by the time evening comes around I’m so impatient to get to Thun at the weekend that I can barely sit still. It’s 9pm. Maria’s been and gone. Dinner’s cooked and eaten. The kids are in bed. I’m trying to watch a film with Michel, but I feel jittery, like I’ve had too much coffee, and I keep checking my phone every two seconds in case Daniel emails me, though I’d have thought if he was going to, he would have by now. He clearly knows Anna – why not just give me her contact details? Perhaps I should write to him again, ask him to at least pass my email on to her.

I know I’ve been fidgeting the whole way through the film because Michel keeps staring at me sideways, a brief – but ever so brief – flash of annoyance shadowing his eyes.

‘Are you okay, Jess?’ he says when I change position on the sofa for the umpteenth time.

‘Yes, fine.’ I smile, put my phone down, and try to stop fidgeting.

The news has come on. The anchor introduces a segment and then I see a reporter standing outside what I think is the Swiss parliament. The camera trains on a group of people celebrating something. My eyes fix on a particular woman in the group. She’s a dignified figure, maybe late sixties or seventies, dressed in a smart navy trouser suit, grey hair in a neat shoulder-length bob, a string of pearls around her neck. She’s embracing a man and there’s such emotion in her face. There are people all around her, but I can’t take my eyes off that one woman.

‘What’s this about, Michel?’

He breathes out, shakes his head. ‘Oh, something quite important has happened. The enfants placés are finally going to be given compensation.’

‘Sorry, the what?’

He hesitates. ‘It’s not something Switzerland talks about very much.’ He pauses and frowns. ‘It concerns children who were taken away from their families by the government.’

I raise my eyebrows. ‘What do you mean?’

‘It was government policy for decades, right up until the late seventies, early eighties. If the authorities decided a child wasn’t being brought up properly then they would take them away and either put them in an institution or place them with another family, often on a farm.’

‘Like in foster care, you mean.’

‘I guess so, but some of them didn’t end up being very cared for. They were considered more like unpaid workers and sometimes treated very badly. Beaten, not fed properly, not allowed to go to school. Some were sexually abused. Others were sterilised against their will.’