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“How long after you disappeared to be with Hannah did I find out I was pregnant?” I guess.

“Yeah.” He runs his fingers through his hair. He still looks tormented.

“A couple of weeks. I think I got pregnant that last night together, but who knows. All I know is that I was brokenhearted, pregnant, unprepared, and far too young to deal with anything myself.” I shrug.

“You never considered keeping her?”

My eyes roll before I’m able to engage my brain. It’s almost an automatic reaction. Did I consider keeping my daughter? Of course I did. At night, I would lie in bed with my hand over my stomach, rubbing the growing bump and dreaming about what she’d be like. I desperately wanted to keep her, but I knew it wouldn’t work. Keeping her would have been a selfish choice, the most selfish choice I could have ever made. I knew it from the moment I found out I was pregnant, when I was in the toilets of a fast-food restaurant, holding the cheap pregnancy stick in my hand, muffling my cries so nobody would hear me if they came into the bathroom.

Knowing I needed to give her up didn’t stop me longing to keep her, though.

“Yes, I considered it. Of course I did,” I whisper. He looks like he wants to talk, but I’m not ready to hear anything else from him, so I carry on before he can say a word. “She is ours, we made her, but I knew deep down that I could never keep her. I knew it from the second I did the test, but it was cemented in me the day she arrived. I held her in my arms and knew she was too fragile for me to keep. I’d have just messed everything up. I’d have ruined everything. Verity promised to give her a good home and to love her like her own, so I let her because at least then I could see Maddie, know she was there, love her in some capacity.”

“You’ve spent eleven years watching somebody else raise your daughter?” he asks. I can’t read his expression properly. Still hurt. Still angry. Something else is there, though, tucked away behind that. Sympathy? Compassion? I can’t decide.

“Better to watch Verity raise her than to have had a closed adoption where I wouldn’t know anything about her,” I murmur.

“Have you thought about it from her point of view? When she’s older and she realises she’s adopted? When she sees the certificates that show Verity isn’t her birth mother? Or if she compares pictures of herself when she’s eighteen to how you looked at eighteen because, Jesus Christ, Dee, she’s practically a goddamn carbon copy of you! Did you think about how that could mess up her life? Realising the person she thinks is her sister is actually her mother?”

The cadence of his voice speeds up with every word he fires at me. His face twists, and that compassion I thought I saw is gone.

“What exactly would you have done, Joseph?”

“You could have come to me and told me. That would have been a good start,” he exclaims.

“You wanted me to magically find out where you lived, then trek across the country and crash into that perfectly wonderful middle-class life of yours, introduce myself to your family and your fiancée as the poor, neglected student you knocked up? I didn’t want to ruin your life.”

“You know, you’re going to have to get over the chip on your shoulder. You cannot use your bad childhood as an excuse for your behaviour in this,” he snaps.

“Like you ever had anything terrible happen in your life.” I glare at him. He knows how bad it was back then.

“You have no idea what my life was like after I left,” he snaps.

“But that was your choice, Joseph! You chose to leave me. It wasn’t inflicted upon you. Besides, I know exactly how your life was after you left. A rising star, remember. A handsome and talented new addition, on my television five days a week. Pictures of you at events with your gorgeous fiancée hanging on your arm.” I fire the words at him, frustrated at his attitude. I take a deep breath. “You chose that over me. I know you say now that you didn’t love her, not in that way, but it certainly looked like you loved her for the years she was at your side. Every article about you just reaffirmed that you chose her, left me. That you didn’t want me.”

“You still should have told me. I should have been involved in the decision.” He starts to pace the room. He reminds me of a tiger trapped in a cage, pacing and desperate to escape.

“What makes you think you had any rights in the decision-making?” I scoff.

“I’m her father!”

“Biologically, yes, but at that moment in time, you were the man who hid his fiancée from me and then left me behind for her. At no point did I think you should have any influence in my decision about what I wanted to do with the pregnancy,” I reason.

“If I hadn’t walked into the shop that night, you’d never have told me, would you?” he asks.

I fall silent. For years, I had dreams where I told him about Maddie. I imagined a different future, one where I made different choices and she was always mine. I thought about the little life we would have had together. I imagined finding Joseph. Telling him. Introducing him to his daughter. I imagined his reaction, pretended that he’d fall hard and fast in love with his daughter and back in love with me.

But I didn’t make that choice. I didn’t keep her. I would never have chosen to track him down and tell him about a daughter he couldn’t see or talk to properly because she thought somebody else was her father. And somebody else was her father. My dad doted on Maddie. She was as devastated as I was when he died.

“I don’t know.” I shake my head, trying to pretend I would have told him at some point.

“You should have told me.”

“You keep saying that.” I sigh.

“Because it’s the truth. You had no right to keep this from me, Delilah,” he snaps. “I should have been included in the decision. I would have….”

“Would have what? Promised me you’d be there? Walked away from your life? Or would you have offered to drive me for an abortion?” I ask.