At 69, I sold my house to travel around the world despite my children’s protests — in Australia, a man invited me to his home for coffee, but when I walked into his living room, I froze.

Mine is 1986.

That is the year my mother told me what she had done about it — which is that she wrote to him herself, once, in the May of 1974, two months after my letter, to say that she was still thinking of him.

He never got it. It went to the farm school, which he had left in 1969, and it came back, and she put it in a drawer.

She told me that at her kitchen table when she was sixty-two and I was thirty, and she said: "I always wondered if he thought that was it."

And I said something comforting and we had a biscuit and we never mentioned it again.

I was thirty years old. My mother handed me, in one sentence, the information that there was a man in Australia who had probably been dropped by our family without a word, and that it had been bothering her for twelve years.