Their various guesses were at once endearing and scary to Bess, knowing they were thinking of the most outlandish things they could and yet still were not even close to predicting what she had come to say.

‘Mario has moved out for a bit.’ As her words landed, her parents stared at her with shock on their faces, their shoulders slumped.

‘Oh no,’ her mum whispered. ‘Surely not!’

‘Yes,’ she sniffed, understanding the tone of disbelief – it was still unbelievable to her and she was living it. ‘And I need to tell you how we got to this point.’ She coughed to clear her throat. This was it. ‘What I have to tell you is not easy. If it were easy’ – she paused – ‘I would have told you a long, long time ago. When I was sixteen, to be precise . . .’

They then listened silently, without the interjection or commentary she might otherwise have expected. She spoke slowly, the words having to swim around the boulder of emotion gathered at the base of her throat. Bess might have been fifty-three, but as she spoke, she felt like her sixteen-year-old self, even looking down at her shins and seeing three round plasters, dotted red with her blood. Speaking as calmly as she was able and at a pace to allow the words to sink in, she finished her desperate tale.

‘So that’s what happened to me, and it has made me so sad. Firstly, to have given her up, and secondly, to have kept her a secret, and also not being able to tell you or talk about her. I have this great sense of shame’ – she put a hand to her throat – ‘and it’s shaped my whole life.’ Nodding at this truth, she looked up at her parents sitting opposite. Both were silent, staring, trying to process the enormous news that they had another grandchild, and that during the time when they had thought she was anxious and upset over her less than adequate exam results, their sixteen-year-old daughter had in fact been pregnant and given birth to a baby. A baby girl. And she had done so without their help or knowledge.

‘So you weren’t on an air hostess course?’ her mum whispered, her expression confused.

‘No, I was in Slough, having a baby.’ Bess’s voice quaked.

‘But all them postcards! I’ve still got them somewhere.’ Jeannie shook her head.

‘I wrote them on the train there and from my little room.’ Bess remembered the searing pain of loneliness and the unease of deceit, as she popped a stamp on each card and shoved them in the letterbox.

‘Were you scared of us? Is that it?’ her dad asked, his voice altered by emotion. It tore at her heart. ‘I don’t think we ever shouted or punished you – we never needed to.’