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.

PART 4 — MAUD

Maud was eleven.

He woke her at about two in the morning on the night he left and he sat on the end of her bed and told her.

Not all of it. He told her that he had to go so that Oona could keep everybody together, and that she was not to tell me, ever, because if I knew I would go and find him and it would come undone.

And my daughter, who was eleven years old, kept that for thirty years.

She kept it through the hearing in 1998. She kept it through her own wedding in 2007. She kept it through nineteen years of Sunday lunches at a table with me at the end of it.

She has told me since that she nearly broke about four times, and that the worst was in 2011 when I had the operation and she sat in a hospital corridor and got as far as the first word.