‘But we did make progress,’ she continues. ‘Evelyne did what she could to help us financially, and Marta, the widow next door who became my friend, helped us fend off questions from other neighbours. When I was old enough, we got married, and I became a nanny, looking after another woman’s child as well as Hedi. Daniel was able to give up the bakery and start veterinary studies at night school. I finally went back to visit the village I grew up in and an old family friend helped me find my sister, Cornelia, who’d returned there after she got out of the terrible detention centre they’d put her in because she’d refused to obey her foster parents. Seeing her again was so wonderful, so healing, even though I never got the chance to see our mother again. She’d died, you see, several years previously.’

She pauses, looks down at the path, and I wait for her to go on.

‘But things were okay, I felt I’d got my life on a good path, and I had some hope for the future. Maybe we would have made it through the hard years, Daniel and I, but he kept pressuring me about Hedi, kept pushing and pushing. I always wondered if it was because he regretted it all, regretted breaking contact with his parents and taking on a pregnant girlfriend at such a young age. I don’t know,’ she sighs. ‘But the secret weighed so heavily on me all that time, that in the end I gave in and told him what I did. And then he left.’

I see the tears rolling down her face but I don’t go to comfort her. I can’t tell her it’s all okay, because it isn’t, and now I know things haven’t been all right for her for a very long time. She’s paid for that crazy decision in the hospital.

‘But you didn’t tell Hedi?’

She shakes her head. ‘We agreed it would be best not to – for her, and for us. I was scared of messing up her life – I’d done that once already; I didn’t want to do it again. And we were both frightened that if she wanted to find Sylvia, we’d lose her. So we told her we were splitting up because we didn’t love each other anymore. Hedi stayed with me, but she’s always had a good relationship with her father. He never loved her any less for knowing.’

I remember Daniel’s long radio silence, and my intuition that he knew more than he was saying. ‘When I contacted him initially, he didn’t admit he even knew you. He didn’t tell me he knew what I was talking about, even though he must have guessed who I was.’