I feel sick just thinking about it.

I want to take a look around, wander through the corridors. I want to know if I’ll feel it, if I’ll somehow know in which room my mother brought me into the world. But I can’t think of an excuse to do it. And I can’t explain it to Michel without the whole thing spilling out. So I sit next to him and Léa as the doctor stitches Luca’s forehead and I wonder how on earth I arrived back here, nearly forty years later.

We’re all quiet in the car on the way home. Léa’s fallen asleep, Michel is silent and I gaze out of the window as we cross the long, high motorway bridge back to Montreux. When we get to the house, Michel carries Luca in first and I hear a gasp from Julia.

I’m surprised she’s actually home from work.

There’s a fraught exchange in French and then she takes Luca from Michel and goes over to the sofa. Michel sits beside them and Léa follows, squeezing herself against Julia, who puts an arm around both children and hugs them tight. I remain in the doorway and swallow down a hard lump of envy in my throat.

She has everything I want.

MARCH 1976 London, UK

SYLVIA

The bar was already heaving when they arrived. Sylvia was sure many of the regulars had been there all afternoon. She wondered how they ever got any work done. But on the other hand, she knew that a stint in El Vino’s or one of the other hack hangouts was a necessity. Over claret and cigars, journalists were creating firm friendships that would likely pay dividends later in their careers, keeping their ears to the ground for an opening on another paper, schmoozing with their seniors in the hope of gaining a regular column or a pay rise, and gossiping over the latest news in and out of Fleet Street: at the moment, it was the breakdown of Princess Margaret’s marriage and Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s shock resignation. Though she disliked the bar’s owner for his ridiculous attitude towards women and supported those who were suing him over it, she begrudgingly went there anyway because to boycott it was only to shoot yourself in the foot. Pick your battles, she’d decided.

She inched her way through the sea of shirts, jackets and ties towards the tables in the back room where the owner deigned to allow women to sit. Marnie was already there with Janice and a couple of other women she didn’t know.

‘What can I get yer, love?’ A waiter was clearing glasses as she sat down.

‘A dry white wine, please,’ she said, hating her own complicity. What bloody use was the new Sex Discrimination Act if she couldn’t just go and order her drink at the bar like the men?