Ellen’s nausea hadn’t helped either. It really colored the way she saw the world. A horrible beige color. It seemed to get better at night. Why hadn’t she remembered that?

When she’d walked into the café, it had reminded her of Internet dating: that intensely peculiar feeling of searching the room for the face of a stranger, a stranger whom you were imagining as a potential life partner. Could I imagine kissing you, waking up with you, arguing with you? Except that there was no escape clause with this meeting, because it didn’t actually matter what she thought of him. She wouldn’t be able to go back online and choose another potential father.

Her eyes had skimmed right past him at first. He was just another one of the ubiquitous gray-haired businessmen in good suits who filled the café. And then she saw her mother sitting opposite him. She almost hadn’t recognized her. She was used to seeing her mother with Mel and Pip, the three of them making a minor spectacle of themselves: talking and laughing louder than anyone else. Her mother seemed somehow diminished sitting opposite this gray-haired man. Instead of sitting back in her chair, with perfect posture like a queen, she was leaning forward, both her forearms resting on the table, her head tilted at a subservient angle.

When she saw Ellen, she sat up abruptly, as if she’d been caught doing something wrong, and then she smiled and waved, and Ellen saw pride, followed almost instantaneously by fear, cross her face.

David, her father, stood up as Ellen walked toward them, and kissed her graciously on both cheeks, in the way that men of a certain age and income level did these days. (“The kissing thing has got out of control in this city lately,” Madeline had said tonight at dinner. “Next thing you know, you’ll have to kiss the checkout chick good-bye as you’re picking up your groceries.”)

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ellen,” he’d said, and then as they sat down he said, more formally, “You’re a very welcome surprise in my life.” But at the moment he said it, a waitress appeared, talking over the top of him, tossing down laminated menus on their table, and then he obviously wasn’t sure if Ellen had heard him and he didn’t know if he should say it again, and Ellen was too busy asking if the waitress could bring some plain bread as quickly as possible, please, so the moment passed for her to reassure him and to say that he was a welcome surprise in her life too. That tiny little moment of social awkwardness had caused his urbane façade to slip a little, and that had given her the squirmy feeling of seeing something she shouldn’t have seen, as though she’d suddenly noticed that he was wearing a toupee.

After that they’d stuck to the small talk. They chatted about the weekend away in the Whitsundays (Glorious! Amazing! Her mother’s voice was so shrill. She sounded like someone else’s mother) and the play they’d seen, about what it was like for David to be living back in Sydney after all these years. He was an orthopedic surgeon and planned to practice for only a few more years before he retired.

“Then I might buy a boat and sail around the world for a year,” he said. He looked at Anne. “Fancy being my first mate?”

Anne glowed. “As long as there’s an espresso machine onboard.”

Every now and then Ellen would think, These are my parents. I’m out having lunch with my parents. She imagined meeting a friend, or a client, someone who didn’t know her history. “This is my mum and dad.”

How extraordinarily ordinary.

Her father had asked her lots of searching questions about hypnotherapy, with elaborately casual references to articles he’d recently read. It was obvious that he’d spent some time researching hypnotherapy specifically for this meeting, which was touching, almost painfully so. Ellen got a prickling sensation behind her eyes as he listened so courteously and attentively to her answers.

It was also obvious that he was relatively open-minded on the subject of “alternative therapies,” especially for a surgeon of his age and background. Her mother didn’t make any of her normal sharp comments. She even made some vaguely complimentary remarks. “Ellen often has a waiting list, you know,” she told David, and a few minutes later, in a doctor-to-another-doctor tone: “Apparently she’s had some quite good results with idiopathic pain management.”

Although you’ve never once referred a patient to me, Mum. Did her mother feel she needed to sell Ellen to him? As if Anne was a single mother and her kid was part of the package, like Jack was part of Patrick’s package.

David spoke about his two sons with a father’s casual tenderness; just using their names caused him to smile involuntarily.

“Do they have children yet?” asked Ellen. She was refusing to think too hard about the fact that these two strange men—one was in real estate and the other was in marketing—two men, a few years younger than her, living on the other side of the world, presumably with English accents and English complexions, were her half-brothers. It was like hearing that the imaginary friends of your childhood had actually existed all along. When she was a child she was always asking her mother if her father had other children, and her mother would answer, depending on her mood, airily or tersely, “Probably.”

She had created sisters and brothers in her imagination: a sexy older brother who wore a leather jacket and rode a motorbike and had lots of handsome friends, a younger sister who adored her, an older sister who lent her makeup. She’d grown out of it, of course. There was really no necessity for two younger brothers now. She was busy. She had enough trouble keeping up with her own friends. What was she meant to do: look them up on Facebook?