“Call her,” I said.

Anna picked up the phone.

Her thumb hovered over the screen.

“James,” she said quietly.

“She may not take this well.

She’s had forty years to build a life around a version of events that wasn’t true.

Finding out the truth now — it may not feel like a gift at first.”

“I know,” I said.

Anna pressed the call button and raised the phone to her ear.

It rang three times.

Then a woman’s voice answered — warm, slightly distracted, the voice of someone in the middle of an ordinary afternoon.

“Mum?

Everything okay?”

Anna looked at me across the table.

“Yes, sweetheart,” she said.

“But I need you to come over.

There’s someone here you need to meet.”

A silence on the line.

Then:

“Mum.

Who is it?”

Anna didn’t look away from me when she answered.

“His name is James,” she said.

“And I’ll explain everything when you get here.”

Chapter 5: The Daughter at the Door

Claire arrived forty minutes later.

I heard the car pull up outside and had to stop myself from going to the window.

I sat at the kitchen table with my hands flat on the surface and waited.

Anna had used the time to tell me small things — that Claire worked as a school librarian, that her husband’s name was Tom, that her two children were eight and eleven.

She offered these details carefully, like she was building a bridge one plank at a time, giving me something to hold onto before the harder thing arrived.

The front door opened.

“Mum, I came as fast as I — “

Claire stopped in the kitchen doorway.

She was tall, with dark hair going silver at the temples.

She had Anna’s eyes.

But the shape of her face, the line of her jaw — I had seen that jaw in the mirror every morning for sixty years.

She looked at me.

Then at her mother.

Then back at me.

“Who are you?” she said.

Her voice was careful.

Not rude.

Just careful, the way people get when they already sense that the answer is going to cost them something.

“My name is James,” I said.

I stood up because it felt wrong to sit while she was standing.

“I was a friend of your mother’s.

A long time ago.”

Claire looked at Anna.

“Mum.”

“Sit down, love,” Anna said.

“Tell me what’s happening first.”

Anna pulled out a chair.