I don’t say anything for a while. It was the last thing I’d been expecting.

‘You gave me away.’ I can hardly comprehend it. Though I haven’t experienced motherhood, I find it hard to believe any mother could do that. But then again, it was forty years ago, when times were different; Anna was sixteen, scared and traumatised.

She nods, puts her hand to her mouth.

‘And you took Mum’s baby.’

She nods again, looks at me with watery eyes. ‘I swapped the ankle tags when you were both in the nursery, just a few hours after you were born. It wasn’t planned. I just did it spontaneously, when the nurse stepped out of the room for a moment, and then she came back and it was done, it was too late to change it.’ I see tears on her cheeks but I feel my heart harden. I can’t go easy on her. I need to understand this. I need to push right to the very end, until I have every tiny detail out of her.

‘I get, maybe, that you might have felt unable to care for a child. But you did, anyway. You just cared for the wrong one. Why didn’t you just give me up for adoption? Why did you have to steal Mum’s baby?’

I wonder, briefly, if passers-by are wondering what I’m doing to make this woman cry, but I don’t care. I’m owed this explanation and I will have it.

‘I wanted Sylvia to have you, only Sylvia. I didn’t want to give you up to a stranger who wouldn’t care about you, the way my foster parents didn’t care about me.’

I’m hearing the words, but my brain is having trouble grasping them.

‘I knew Sylvia could give you a better life than anything I could offer you. I know it sounds crazy but somehow, in my young head, it made sense. I would still have a child – and I so wanted a child to care for, to stop me feeling alone – but I would know that my own baby, you, would be brought up with so many more opportunities, with the privileges that money could offer. I just wanted you to have the best life possible, everything I didn’t have. And perhaps also…’

‘What?’ I say. ‘What?’

‘Perhaps a small part of me thought if the authorities found out I was sixteen and unmarried and took Sylvia’s baby away from me it wouldn’t hurt as much as if they took you.’

She hangs her head and I hear her almost whisper, ‘I can’t believe I felt that about her.’

I shake my head. I can’t process this. ‘So you loved me, but you gave me away anyway?’