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A few years later, my company moved me to a city farther south, where the weather was milder and everything ran at a slower pace.

One Saturday, I took my daughter to the play area in the shopping centre.

She'd been at the care home when I first started doing volunteer work there. She was quiet, watchful, the kind of child who doesn't ask for much. Whenever she saw me, she would come and press a sweet into my palm, then look away.

I'd completed the adoption paperwork the following spring. She called me Mum. I gave her a home.

We sat in the play area, and I was waiting on one of the benches with a takeaway cup of tea.

"Sylvia."

I hadn't heard that voice in years.