My biological father turned up after fourteen years with a new car on my seventeenth birthday. Then he looked past me at my stepdad and said one sentence.

From the September of 2012 until the February of this year, Ottilie Ash sent my mother two hundred pounds a month.

Every month. A hundred and fifty-three of them.

Never through Roland. He did not know. She never told him and she asked my mother not to.

And my mother never told me.

She has told me why and I believe her and it is still the hardest conversation we have ever had.

Ottilie asked to see me twice. In 2014 and in 2018, in writing.

And my mother said no, both times, because letting that woman in meant letting Roland have a door, and in 2014 she had a seven-year-old who had stopped asking where his dad was and she was not going to start that again.

So she took the money and she said no to the visits, and she has been carrying both of those for eleven years.

Ottilie kept sending it anyway. That is the part I cannot get past. She was told no twice and she sent it for another seven years.