It’s a good few days before I can find the time to do anything about searching for Daniel Buchs. But one late afternoon, with the kids wiped out after a day at the outdoor pool and collapsed in front of Finding Dory (they’ve been speaking English all day, so I’ve let them watch the French language version, and I feel a pleasing sense of defiance to imagine what Julia might say about that), I sit outside on the terrace with my mobile. First I search the online phone book and find an incredible eighty-nine listings under the name Daniel Buchs.

My heart sinks. I don’t think I can bear to call eighty-nine numbers, most of them in German-speaking Switzerland, and try to explain what I want over the phone.

I try Google instead and get 133,000 results. I scan down the webpage: LinkedIn profiles, Facebook profiles, various websites in French and German that I don’t understand. Though the number of results is overwhelming, excitement prickles my skin. Daniel Buchs could be out there, breathing, living. I just have to find him.

But how?

He could be any of these people or none of them. I need more to go on, to narrow things down a bit. I debate just messaging some of them through their social media profiles, but I don’t know what to say. Hello, you might have once had a sister who knew my mother around the time she gave birth in a Lausanne hospital in 1976 and possibly might have known what went wrong. It’s ridiculous – but maybe it’s the only way.

I open a document and start copying links to the social media profiles of all the Daniel Buchs I can find. I scour Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, hoping my Daniel Buchs isn’t so technologically inept that he doesn’t use such things; he must be at least sixty now, after all. But even if he doesn’t, someone else might have mentioned him online. No one is completely untouched by the internet, surely. Although Brigitte Mela seems to be, I remind myself.

After an hour’s work I have a substantial list to work through. Some I can tell immediately are probably too young, but I list them anyway. Perhaps he’s one of those people who names their son after themselves, so the son might lead me to the father. Others could be duplicates, it’s hard to tell. Some are just a brief mention – one on a website for a sailing club in Zug, another in the caption on a group photo of hikers from a walking club in Reichenbach im Kandertal, wherever that is. I track down email addresses for the administrators of both and add them to the list.