‘You can’t use my real name. Please call me Brigitte. It’s my mother’s middle name. Just in case the authorities read it. They can’t know it’s me.’

Sylvia nodded and wrote the name down to show her the spelling. ‘Okay?’

Anna nodded. ‘When are you due?’ she asked.

‘October tenth.’ Sylvia didn’t match Anna’s smile. ‘You?’

‘October sixteenth.’ She beamed, and Sylvia saw how excited Anna was at the prospect of having a baby. She didn’t have much to provide, but she would give it the most important thing of all, the thing she hadn’t had nearly enough of herself – love.

They left Anna and Daniel’s flat and caught the bus back into Lausanne city centre.

‘I want to do something for her,’ Sylvia said, when they were installed in a cafe. Perhaps it was just her stupid hormones, but her time with Anna made her want to weep.

‘You are. You’re writing that article.’

‘Something more. Something concrete. They have nothing. How are they going to cope with a baby in that tiny flat?’

Sylvia sat back in her chair on the cafe terrace and rested a hand on her belly. Listening to Anna had been emotionally hard, but for some reason she felt physically drained, too, with a headache pounding at her temples. Guilt-induced, probably. Guilt that she had so much in comparison, and yet had been so ungrateful for it.

‘They’ll just have to, there’s no other choice,’ Evelyne said. The waitress came and they ordered drinks – coffee for Evelyne and lemonade for Sylvia. The air had the metallic smell of fresh rain on hot tarmac. Back home, summer had finally broken over the bank holiday weekend with a downpour almost as intense as the drought that preceded it, and here it felt like autumn was finally around the corner, too. It was the end of the long, hot summer – and the beginning of a new phase of life.

‘Thank you for translating,’ Sylvia said. ‘It must have been strange for you, hearing all that about your parents.’

‘A little.’ Evelyne paused. ‘A lot.’ She looked down at her coffee. ‘It wasn’t a surprise, any of that. I mean, I was there. I know what my father is like, how he treated her. But I suppose I never really thought about it beyond the physical. I never thought about what she’d lost. I just accepted it. I was a teenager when she came to the farm and I was so caught up in my own battles with my father that I didn’t consider how hard it must have been for Anna to be away from her own family.’

‘Do you know anything about them?’

‘Not really. I never asked.’ Evelyne picked up her coffee cup and Sylvia saw her eyes were shining.

‘You were a child too. You couldn’t be expected to do anything.’