It's inarguably the most positive response this news has got from anyone, so far, and for an almost awkwardly long moment she isn't sure exactly how to respond. Eventually, she says, with the oddest little smile- “Belly-button. The baby hasn't got one yet, that's- that's where we're connected, inside. They'll cut us apart after birth; that's where I used to be connected to my mother.”

And thinking about Anne Sauvageon is always complicated, at best. She's never going to see her again, and in some ways that's easier than never seeing her father - in other ways, much harder. She'd had time with her father in a way that it feels she didn't really get with her mother. She's carried resentment for years, misplaced hurts and little things, and the more she begins to let go of that, the harder it is to live with the fact that she has to live with it, now. There is no going back, and there is no fixing it. No forward, for them, just memories that she can't be sure she should rely on.

She wonders what Anne would think of this. She decides, without dwelling on it long, that she probably doesn't want to know.

“I really want it to be good,” she says.