And so she’d borne the shame of it in Ireland in 1973, when an unmarried pregnant girl was considered little better than a whore and was treated by everyone accordingly. I’d always assumed that my own mother, my birth mother, had been unwed and given me up because of how difficult it would have been to rear a child alone in the forties. But things hadn’t changed that much since then. Had I done to Alice what my own father had done to my mother?
