I take a long breath, trying to calm my racing pulse. ‘How about with how you knew? How did you find out I’d been swapped with another child? I mean, that must be what happened, right? When did you find out? And if you knew the hospital had made such a terrible mistake, why didn’t you do something about it?’

She looks down at her lap and I see her hands are shaking. A family walks past us with a toddler pushing a plastic buggy, which she rams into my foot. The mother apologises and ushers her child away with stern words, but I barely look at her. My eyes are on Anna, willing her to speak. I need to know, right now. I need this story out.

‘You have to understand, I was only sixteen when I had you.’ She looks up at me. ‘I should never have been pregnant at that age. We had no money. I rarely saw Daniel in those first few months when we arrived in Lausanne because he was working all the time to support us. I was so alone, and after being so happy I’d left the farm I was living on, I became very scared.’

‘Of what?’

‘Everything. Scared the authorities would find out I was an unmarried sixteen-year-old and take the baby away from me, put it in some horrible institution or with some family that wouldn’t love her. And I was scared that, even if they didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to give you a good life. I didn’t want you to end up like me.’

My head feels light, fuzzy. My brain is trying to grasp something, but it’s just out of reach, languishing in the fuzz.

‘And then there was Sylvia. She was older than me, and I thought she was so chic and sophisticated and intelligent, with a career and prospects and a husband with the same. I was completely in awe of her. And when she interviewed me—’

‘Wait, you actually met Mum? She interviewed you?’ I’m struggling to keep up with this succession of facts that are revelatory to me.

Anna nodded. ‘Yes, for an article about my time at the farm. Daniel’s parents’ farm. I’d lived there since I was eight, when the authorities took me away from my mother and sister and sent me to live there. I worked like a dog, and they gave me no love, little kindness.’ She shakes her head and something pricks at the back of my mind.

The television news. A lawyer and a distinguished older woman with tears in her eyes. What had Michel said? Something about children taken from their families and sent to work on farms. Abuse. Neglect. Government apologies.