A few days ago Anna was a phantom, a mystery who may or may not exist. Someone rooted in a time so long ago that I couldn’t fathom she could also exist now.

But she does.

I’ve looked into her eyes that are so like my own. I’ve felt her hand on mine. I’ve got her mobile number saved in my phone. And now I know Anna made contact with Mum, that before Evelyne died she insisted Anna tell Mum what she did – or she would. And there it is in my handbag, the proof that Mum knew, that she kept Anna’s secret to herself for nearly twenty years.

A wave of nausea washes through me to think what that must have cost her, what burden she must have carried to know, without telling Dad or me, for so many years.

I can’t eat, though it’s eight in the evening now. And I know I won’t sleep, though I’m exhausted from the emotion of it all. So I stand up from the bed, put my handbag over my shoulder and walk down to the lakeside. It’s getting dark, but the promenade is still buzzing with people strolling in the mild air. I sit on the wall, sling my legs over so I’m facing the mountains.

Something about their constancy calms me; these peaks have been there long before I was born in a hospital down the road, and they’ll be there long after Anna’s gone and I’m gone and my convoluted life is remembered by no one. The mountains that have been the backdrop to my mission out here now seem a metaphor for my life. Anna’s decision sent two tectonic plates crashing together, altering the shape of our lives forever. One tiny but seismic moment, and so many lives were changed.

I take the letter out of my bag. Despite what Anna said, I’m scared of opening it.

But I do.

It’s dated March 1996. I would have been at university then. Mum and Dad, newly on their own after nineteen years bringing up a child. Me, glugging watered-down lager in dingy clubs and going to rowing club socials, not because I rowed but because of the above-average quota of attractive men in attendance. I can’t believe this was happening in parallel, while I remained in both such innocence and such certainty about the foundations of my life.

Dear Anna,

I read, and my heart clenches at the familiar sight of my mother’s handwriting.