But despite their gentle chiding of each other, I can see the affection between them and I feel a hard knot in my throat at the sheer perfection of this whole family. The stable, mutually supportive marriage, the two beautiful children, the successful careers, the lovely home… I was meant to have this by now. But instead it’s like a hand came out of nowhere and slapped my life off its axis. I ache to go back to before. I want the comfort of marriage, the certainty of my parents’ love, the stability of St Mary’s, the prospect of a family of my own. But I don’t have any of that now.

I don’t even know who I am anymore.

That night, when everyone else is asleep, I pull out the folder from my suitcase and put it on the bed in front of me. My accumulated research from the past two years. It’s not much because I haven’t had a lot to go on. The tests posed the question, but didn’t give any hints to the answer. The hospital in Lausanne was little help, claiming there was no paper trail, though I’ve always wondered if they were just covering their own backs. All I had was a potential name – Brigitte Mela. That’s all they could give me. The internet threw up very little of use, and of course I couldn’t ask Mum.

Grief slugs me in the gut as it always does when I think of her. Sometimes, even after four years, I fully expect her to walk in the door like nothing has changed. Her personality, her essence, remains woven into my every day, even though she’s not physically here anymore. But so much has happened since she’s been gone, and I’m glad she wasn’t here to see everything I’ve been through, that she didn’t know the pain of receiving those test results. At least she was saved from that.

I sift through the papers in the folder, even though I’ve looked at them a hundred times. My eyes slide over the DNA clinic’s letter, which I still find so hard to read, and printouts of emails from the hospital.

Please accept our sincere sympathy for your situation…

And then the newspaper article, the feature that Mum wrote after she came here in 1976. I pick it up and look at the photos: Evelyne Buchs standing in front of the Swiss parliament building holding a homemade banner demanding equality for women.