Page 44 of All Our Missing Pieces

‘Is your landlady feeding you properly?’

‘Are you coping okay with those two kids?’

Beatrice answered their questions patiently and honestly, and asked a few of her own – how was Sligo, the family Labrador? Were her parents going to spend their usual week in Florida in August? Had the Gilmores next door sold their house yet?

Then she said, ‘Listen, Mom and Dad. There’s something I want to tell you.’

‘What is it, honey?’ Her mother’s brow creased anxiously. ‘Are you all right? Do you need money? We can wire you some right away. You’ve not met some boy and fallen in love, have you? Because we’d⁠—’

‘Let Beatrice speak, Ruth,’ her dad chided.

‘Thanks, Dad.’ Beatrice tried to laugh. ‘Please don’t worry, Mom. I’m fine. I just wanted to talk to you about this because it’s important and I don’t want to hurt your feelings, okay?’

‘Go on then, honey.’ Her dad rested his chin on his hand, leaning in close to the screen.

‘First promise me you won’t be hurt or angry.’

‘If there’s something troubling you, we’ll do whatever we can to make it right,’ her mom said – which didn’t actually answer Beatrice’s question.

Beatrice took a deep breath. ‘Here’s the thing. The reason I wanted to come out here – part of the reason, anyway – was because I… I want to know more about myself. My background. That’s why I went to Ireland first.’

‘I see.’ Her dad’s face was grave.

‘It’s not that you haven’t been amazing parents,’ Beatrice gabbled. ‘You’re the best. I love you and I always will. You’ll always be my mommy and daddy. But I decided that I want to find my birth mother, if I can. I’m trying to do that and I wanted to ask if you’ll help me.’

‘Oh, sweetheart.’ Her mother took a tissue from the box that always stood on the desk and wiped her eyes. ‘We knew this might happen one day. We’ve talked about it often, haven’t we, honey?’

‘Now, don’t upset yourself, Ruth.’ Her dad slipped his arm round her mother’s shoulder and pulled her close. ‘Of course, we knew this time might come. But you know, it might very well not be possible to trace her.’

‘I know,’ Beatrice began. ‘But⁠—’

‘It will probably be impossible,’ her mom interjected. ‘We want you to know that. We don’t want you to be disappointed.’

‘If I can’t find her, so what?’ Beatrice said. ‘I’ll just be in the same place I am now. No big deal.’

But she knew that wasn’t true.

Her dad pushed his glasses up his nose. Beatrice knew this meant he was about to go into explaining mode, and he did.

‘Things were different back then, especially in Ireland,’ he said. ‘There was a real culture of secrecy around unmarried mothers. It was believed to be for the best – for them and their babies. We were given almost no information ourselves.’

‘I know,’ Beatrice said.

‘And there’s another thing.’ Her father sighed. ‘We don’t even know if that information was true. Often, what adoptive parents were told wasn’t. They were given details about the baby’s birth parents that had been falsified, in order to make…’

He hesitated, and Beatrice found herself listening intently.

‘In order to make the baby seem more attractive,’ her father finished with a heavy sigh.

‘Not that you could have been anything other than attractive to us,’ her mother cut in. ‘We fell in love with you the moment we laid eyes on you. You know that.’

‘I know,’ Beatrice repeated.

Her father continued as if they hadn’t spoken. ‘The child of, say, a factory worker might have been harder to find adoptive parents for than the child of a university student, as we were told your birth mother was. The authorities knew that, and they wanted to give every baby the best chance. So sometimes…’

‘They lied.’ Beatrice tried to swallow the lump growing in her throat. What if that was the case? What if none of it was true – not the bit about being from a wealthy family in Clonmara, or even what she’d managed to glean about the big house in East London?

What if all her theories were wrong, and her birth mother was still somewhere in Ireland, cleaning floors or working on an assembly line in a factory somewhere?