My fiancé vanished a week before our wedding and left me his ten children. Thirty years later a man I had never seen knocked on my door in the middle of Sunday lunch.

I got it open.

One page. His handwriting, which I had not seen since a kitchen table in 1995 and which I knew instantly.

And the first line is:

By now Maud will have told you. If she hasn’t, don’t be angry with her — I made her promise when she was eleven.

PART 2 — THE FORMS

In the November of 1995 there was a thing at my parents’ house. Somebody’s anniversary. About twenty-five people.

I had the adoption forms in my bag because I had collected them that week and because I was going to ask my mother a question about my father’s address history for one of the sections.

I got them out at the end of the table.

And my mother came round and took them out of my hands.

She squared them off on the sideboard and put her hand flat on top of them.

And she said, to twenty-five people: