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push the issue a bit more somewhere down the track. It will be much easier to press for those details later on when everyone is calm.’
    I looked to the television. The evening news was starting. This was the time when I would normally reach for the remote and turn over to a soap or cartoon or just about anything else.
    My routine may have changed forever; it seemed that my attempt to avoid the worst of news in the world had failed; the bad news had found me and in the most personal way possible.
    But the changing of the television programmes was proof that the progression of time continued as it always had – the world had not stopped, although in just a few moments, its axis seemed to have forever shifted.
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    I tried to sleep, after a few hours of sporadic, confused and disjointed analysis with Ted. I repeated myself a lot. We’d start to talk, and then the conversation would become too painful and I’d insist it stop, only to bring the topic up myself again just minutes later. When he suggested we go to bed, I resisted at first, because I still had work to do and I couldn’t imagine stilling my racing mind anyway. The deciding factor was that he was going to leave the room and I couldn’t bear to be alone.
    I lay within the confines of his arms until he was asleep, but I couldn’t even bring myself to close my eyes. Every time I did, flashes of my childhood shot past me; the playful holidays we’d regularly taken, the comforting overnight presence of my mother when I was sick, the patient provision of endless speech therapy for all of those years when my stammer seemed like an undefeatable foe. Instead of warmth and a feeling of unbelievable fortune, now those memories inspired a shame at not even suspecting the lie – not once .
    How could they have kept this from me?
    How could I not have known?
    I gave up and left the bed when Ted started his deep snoring routine. I made a cup of tea, and sat back down at the table, taking the same seat I’d been sitting in so many hours ago when the doorbell rang. The sun was gone now and it was cold. I pulled my dressing gown tightly around my shoulders. Then I opened the laptop and brought up a search engine, and my fingers hovered over the keyboard.
    Where to begin?
    I knew that both Mum and Dad had been working at a rural hospital four hours west of Sydney when I was born, in a sleepy rural city named Orange; one which we’d never visited in spite of my curiosity over the years. Every time I had to write a place of birth for an application, I’d wondered about this mysterious place and I’d often asked her if we could go there together, to see the hospital and so she could tell me about my birth and show me the house I first came home to. She always offered the most plausible excuses. I’d never so much as suspected there might be a sinister reason behind her avoidance of that place.
    I typed in the word.
    Orange .
    And then my hands froze up as I thought about those strange words Ted had introduced me to; maternity home . I closed my eyes and pictured a prison-like structure with bars on the windows and faces of pregnant teenagers peering helplessly from between them.
    My fingers went to work again.
    Maternity .
    Home .
    I clicked search.
    There was recent news coverage – lots of it. I clicked on the top link.
    Pressure is mounting on the Australian government to apologise to families impacted by the government’s forced adoption policies in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s in Australia . . . Although exact numbers are unknown as records were often destroyed or not kept at all, it is believed that up to 150,000 babies were taken from their mothers during the period, with some commentators calling this an epidemic of unimaginable proportions. Midwives, doctors and social workers—
    As soon as my eyes hit the words social worker , I hit the back button with a little too much force.
    I turned to Wikipedia.
    Orange and District Maternity Home.
    There were a few