One morning in late September 2023, I discovered by chance that my birth mother had been killed almost a year earlier. The revelation came while I was searching my work email for a stray message. In the bin folder, amid a slurry of irrelevant press releases, lay an unopened email, ­flagging a long-forgotten Google alert I had set up for her name, Susan Barras. We had been estranged for almost 15 years, so this in itself provoked trepidation. I had cut contact with her when our relationship had finally become too fraught and emotionally ­exhausting for me to continue. Opening the email, I realised with shock that the alert had been triggered by a probate notice about her estate. Susan was only 69 when she died, and my first thought was that the breast cancer she was being treated for when we were in touch had returned. My second was the realisation that both my birth parents were now dead – my birth father had died of liver failure in late 2018, aged 70. But then …