If Georg knew about my son, then so did Pa Salt. I remembered the words that had upset and destabilised me so much in his parting letter to me.

Please believe me when I say that family is everything. And that the love of a parent for a child is the most powerful force on earth.

As I sipped my beer in the sunshine, I was convinced I could now walk back to Georg’s office and confront him. Ask him to tell me exactly who it was that had adopted my son and where in the world he was. But I also knew that what Floriano had said to me made sense. However much I longed to tell my beloved son why I had given him up, and to achieve some form of redemption for myself, currently it was a purely selfish need.

A sudden burst of anger filled me as I thought of the unseen and all-powerful hand of Pa Salt, who still seemed to control my life from beyond the grave. And maybe, I realised, that of my son too.

What right did he have to know things about myself that even I didn’t?

And yet, just like those who went to pray at the altar of an invisible power that they trusted implicitly – purely on human instinct and little factual evidence – I too felt comforted by Pa Salt’s omnipotence. If my father had known – and the guilt in Georg’s eyes after he’d made his very human error had confirmed he did – then I knew for certain that my boy was somewhere on the planet being cared for.

It had not been my father who had lacked trust in our relationship. It had been me. I could see clearly now that he’d also understood the reasoning behind my decision not to confide in him and accepted it. He’d allowed me to make my own choice which – I admitted brutally – had not just been about fear of his parental reaction. It had been about me too. Nineteen years old, experiencing freedom for the first time, with what I’d been sure was a brilliant future in front of me, the last thing I’d wanted was the responsibility of bringing up a child alone. And perhaps, I mused, if I had gone to Pa then, confessed and talked over the options with him, I might well have come to the same conclusion anyway.

I thought about my own mother. A similar age, in a similar dilemma, albeit at a different moment in time.

‘I forgive you,’ I said suddenly. ‘Thank you,’ I added, knowing that whatever her motivation, her decision had been right for me, her daughter.

My thoughts flashed back once again to Pa Salt. I gave a small chuckle as I thought that I wouldn’t have put it past him to have interviewed the prospective adoptive parents himself.

Maybe he had, maybe he hadn’t, but in that moment, as I sat draining my beer, I felt at peace for the first time since my baby had been born thirteen years ago.