Maud is forty-one. We had one conversation on the Sunday night, in that kitchen, after everybody had gone, that lasted until about four in the morning.
I told her I was not angry.
She said she had not been frightened of me being angry. She said she had been frightened that I would ask her why she had not given me the chance to decide.
They’re not yours and everyone in this room knows it.
My mother said that in her own dining room in front of twenty-five people, with a set of adoption forms under her hand.
She was factually correct in the November of 1995 and everybody at that table agreed with her, and I sat down and ate my pudding.
Then I took the forms back at ten o’clock when nobody was watching, which is the only genuinely brave thing I have ever done.
And the man everybody in that room thought had run away had already made exactly the same calculation I was making, five months earlier, in a car park, on his own.
