After her teenaged daughter had retired to bed, Rosetta Melki curled up on a lounge chair to re-read the letter from a solicitor in New Zealand.
A smooth sweep of her dark-brown hair obscured the page.
She pushed the wayward strand behind her shoulder and skimmed the subject line, half-listening to the rhythm of the rain as it pelted against the bungalow’s lead-lit windows amidst flickers of playful lightning.
Robert Mark Bentley, a newly discovered half-brother.
What would Robert be like?
Would he be musical, like she was, and have the same olive-toned skin?
Maybe he’d be artistic like Izzie and a snowy-complexioned redhead as well.
Rosetta had only ever thought Izzie’s colouring came from her ex. A typical Scot in appearance was Angus. Whether the titian was peppered with grey these days wasn’t of much interest. Anyone capable of deserting a daughter and shirking the costs of child-raising was…
But why think of Angus at a time like this? The letter had said she had a brother, ablood relativeof her own.
She glided a hand over the crisp ivory page.
The letter had provided her with another gift.
The name of her mother.
According to our records, you are the biological half-sibling of our client and biological daughterof the late Mrs Daniela Sophia Bentley.
Daniela, the mother she’d never known, benevolent but not quite real, the smiling and receptive half of imagined conversations.
Tonight those conjured talks concluded with the words ‘I’m sorry.’ Rosetta was sorry she’d not made greater efforts to find her, sorry her mother’s
