Juliette sat quietly opposite the tulips, which seemed to have drooped, lurched downwards under the weight of the revelation, disbelief trickling down her face, as Cynthia recalled exactly how Juliette had recognised her birth mother’s name. She could remember every detail of that morning, what, ten or eleven years ago now, when they’d spent Christmas at Cynthia’s mother’s house, down in the New Forest. Juliette had been such an inquisitive little girl and her nana had loved her so, doted on her, more than poor Barney (as everyone knew but no-one dared acknowledge), and they had shared such a wonderful bond. Juliette had been an absolute poppet, so eager, so helpful – setting the table for Christmas, making glittery name tags for everyone, putting up the Christmas cards her nana had saved for the children to do on lengths of silver ribbon (not that Barney had bothered, he’d just ripped a couple up and been told off), alternating the sizes and shapes, making them look perfect. It would have been the 27th or 28th of December, the first day of post after Christmas. Juliette had been sitting patiently at the kitchen table, her bowl of Weetabix neatly eaten, waiting for Barney to finish so they could both get down, when the letterbox had clattered and her nana had asked her to run and pick up the post before her badly behaved dachshund Dexter got to it, he loved chewing it up. There had been only three items – a plain envelope with a cloudy window addressed to Mrs P. L. Simmons that looked boring to Juliette, a bill perhaps; a thin insubstantial-feeling card for Mrs Penelope Simmons; and another small square card addressed to someone unknown, and then in a different-coloured ink, as though written at a later time, a c/o alongside Penelope’s address. As she sat in her cosy warm kitchen with not a teacup out of place, Cynthia went over that morning in vivid technicoloured detail – how she’d noticed as she buttered her toast that her fuchsia nail varnish had chipped, she must take it off; how she’d nagged Barney to finish his cereal (Golden Nuggets they were, she had scolded her mother for buying such junk, and Penelope had said, ‘Oh it won’t hurt them just this once’); how she’d watched Juliette come back into the kitchen and read out each envelope in turn, showing off what a fantastic reader she’d become; remembering Juliette’s nana saying, ‘Yes, you can open them, dear,’ hearing Juliette reading, quite innocently in her little girl’s voice, ‘Elisabeth Potts – like pots and pans! – c/o (pronounced ‘cee oh’) 3 Willow Grove, Lyndhurst, Ha—’ And then she, Cynthia, jumping up from the table and snatching the card off her daughter and saying, more sternly than she ever had, ‘That one’s not for you,’ leaving poor Juliette looking tearful, violated, and Cynthia knowing she had handled it badly, attracted way more attention than she needed to have, but it had been the shock of course.
Cynthia felt strangely calm, now the secret was out at last, and she wondered whether they should have just told Juliette years before, and to hell with Elisabeth’s rights, sod what her sister had wanted – after all, she’d been so unfathomably selfish about everything. But it was too late to worry about any of that now, Cynthia had done her best, it was what it was. She looked across at her trembling daughter (or should she think of her as her niece now, what on earth was the etiquette?) who she loved more than anything, and as the colour slowly returned to Juliette’s face, Cynthia sat patiently and waited for her to speak.