Mother: Eileen Wardle, Nineteen. Father: Blank.

The envelope had one thing in it, folded twice.

A birth certificate.

---

A boy. Born the eleventh of February 1959, at a mother and baby home outside Bristol that Gwen had never heard of and which she looked up the following day and which closed in 1974 and is now flats.

Mother: Eileen Wardle. Nineteen. Occupation: assistant, drapery.

Father: blank.

Name: Peter.

---

Gwen read it down the phone in a completely flat voice, the way you read out a registration number.

Then she said, “He’s called Peter.”

“Peter,” said Ian.

“We’ve got a brother called Peter.”

There was a long silence.

“He’d be sixty-seven,” said Ian, who is good with numbers and who had clearly done it while she was still reading.

---

Here is what Gwen knew about her mother before that Thursday.

That she was strict about tidiness and soft about almost everything else. That she had worked in the school office for twenty-two years and could not be persuaded to retire a single day early, and had gone back in as a volunteer for two years after she did.

That she had lost her own mother at thirty and had never, ever talked about her, in a way that the family had always treated as a settled fact about her personality rather than as information.

That she made a Christmas cake in October and would not hear of any other arrangement.

That she had a particular way of going quiet in February. Two or three days, usually in the middle of the month, where she would be perfectly pleasant and entirely absent, and where their father used to say, “Leave your mother be.” The family had always put it down to the dark, and there had been a running joke about it, and Gwen had repeated that joke to her own children.

The eleventh of February.

---

Gwen sat with that one for a long time, and it is the piece that still, two years on, can take her legs out in a supermarket.

Sixty-six Februaries. Nobody in the house knowing what the room was for.

---

“There’s a thing I keep thinking,” she said to Ian, at about midnight.

“Go on.”

“I nursed her. At the end. I did three weeks of nights in that front room and I held her hand and I said all of it — I said thank you, and I said we’d be all right, and I said everything you’re supposed to say.”

“Yes.”

“And she was lying there,” said Gwen, “with all of this in her, and she let me say all of that, and she didn’t say it. She had three weeks and morphine and her daughter holding her hand, and she didn’t say it.”

Ian said, “Would you have wanted her to?”

Gwen thought about it properly, which took a while.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes. Not for her. For him. He was out there the whole time.”

---

They did not do anything for four days.

That surprises people. Gwen has been asked more than once why they did not start looking that night, and the honest answer is that they were both frightened of the same thing, which was that he might be dead.

Sixty-seven is not old. It is also not nothing. And the version of this where they found him in a records office and the record ended in 2011 was, for four days, the only version either of them could picture.

---

On the fifth day, Gwen’s daughter — who is thirty-four and impatient and who had been told about the box on day two — rang and said: “There’s an adoption contact register. There’s a whole process. Mum, there are people who do this.”

“I know.”

“You don’t have to do the detective bit. You just put your name on.”

“I know,” said Gwen.

“So what’s stopping you?”

And Gwen said the thing that had actually been stopping her, which she had not admitted to Ian.

“What if he doesn’t want us,” she said. “What if we’re the people who gave him away.”

---

Her daughter, who is not sentimental, said: “Then he says no, and you’ll have offered. That’s better than the alternative and you know it is.”

Gwen put her name on the register on the Monday.

She has described the next five weeks as the longest of her life, which she accepts is what everybody says, and which she says anyway.