Chapter 2
Hope had been in her new job for two weeks, dividing her time between working in the maternity department at St Piran’s Hospital and the midwifery unit in Port Agnes.
It had been a dream of hers to be able to work across both hospital and community midwifery, which truly represented the best of both worlds as far as she was concerned.
The fact that a role in integrated care had come up in the Three Ports area of Cornwall had felt like pure serendipity, after discovering that the man she’d been told was her biological father worked at St Piran’s.
The decision to reach out and try to discover who her biological parents were hadn’t been an easy one.
She’d never felt any kind of void where there might have been one, because her mum and dad were so amazing and she’d been with them from just a few days after her birth.
Back then they were foster carers, with two young daughters of their own, and Hope had been taken straight from the hospital to stay with them.
Her birth mother and her family had decided it would be easier on them all that way.
It had been intended as a temporary measure, on what was called a ‘bridging to adoption placement’.
Hope had quite quickly been matched with a couple who’d been on the waiting list to adopt for almost five years, and everything was moving forward, when the man who would have been Hope’s adopted father was diagnosed with a serious heart condition, derailing the plan.
The adoption was put on hold while he went through surgery and further treatment, and she remained with Dave and Alison, with the plan that the adoption would eventually proceed if and when the local authority was confident that he would make a full recovery.
Hope was eighteen months old when the couple themselves decided to pull out, because the husband’s health was still precarious and they wanted to focus on his recovery.
By that time, Hope was incredibly attached to both Dave and Alison, and their daughters.
She already called them Mummy and Daddy, having copied her elder sisters, and they loved her too, begging the social workers not to find another family to adopt her and take Hope away from the only family she’d ever known.
They’d told the social workers they’d give up fostering, if they were permitted to adopt Hope.
They just wanted to be allowed to keep their little girl, because that’s what she was by then: theirs.
It was another six months before Dave and Alison were finally given the go-ahead to begin the adoption process, and more than a year after that before everything was finalised.
Bea was the baby of the family. Alison had fallen pregnant with her almost five years after Hope officially became their third daughter, but it hadn’t changed anything – except to add yet more love to the Masterson household.
Her father had seemed to revel in being surrounded by ‘his girls’ as he called them, joking that after having four daughters it had only been Teddy, the family dog, who’d done anything to stop him being completely outnumbered.
Hope had spent her whole life immersed right in the centre of her family, surrounded by an innate sense of belonging that had never once wavered.
It was only when she’d started suffering from lethargy and weight loss, and had undergone some blood tests, that things changed.
Discovering that she had haemochromatosis had been a relief in many ways, because she’d worried that it might be something far more serious.
Haemochromatosis was a fairly common disorder, resulting from the over absorption of iron.
It was treated by three-monthly blood transfusions, all of which felt like something she could easily live with, that wouldn’t have a huge impact on her life.
What changed things was the discovery that it was a hereditary condition and, for the first time in her life, Hope felt she needed to know more about where she came from in a biological sense.
It wasn’t that she needed her biological parents in her life from an emotional perspective and she wasn’t sure she’d ever have sought them out without that diagnosis.
Of course she’d wondered about them, especially after hearing the full details of her birth story, when she was not much younger than her biological mother had been.
She just hadn’t wanted anything to change at home, and the Mastersons were her family.
They always would be. So, despite that curiosity, she hadn’t done anything about finding them until her diagnosis.
Even then, it had been her parents who’d pushed her to take action, and she’d never forget the conversation.
‘Sweetheart.’ Her dad’s voice had been gentle as he’d come to stand beside her in the sunny kitchen of her childhood home in Tenby. ‘Your mum and I have been talking.’
‘You want me to move out, don’t you?’ She’d widened her eyes in mock-horror, confident in the knowledge that her parents would never push any of their daughters out of the nest. Hope had been almost twenty-five by then and was back living at home temporarily, after accepting a one-year contract to cover another midwife’s maternity leave at Withybush Hospital in Haverfordwest, about fifteen miles from Tenby.
She’d studied for her midwifery degree in Bristol and stayed on in the city afterwards, working at Southmead Hospital, where she’d had the chance to experience high-risk pregnancies and deliveries.
The job in Haverfordwest was at a midwifery-led unit, which gave her the opportunity to experience a different kind of environment, while she considered the next stage of her career.
She’d thought about renting somewhere local, after giving up her flat in Bristol when she left Southmead to take the new job, but her parents had wanted her to move back in with them, and the truth was it had been what she wanted too.
She loved coming home to the five-storey sky-blue house that formed part of a colourful terrace overlooking the beach.
But it wasn’t the house or the view that drew her back – it was the people.
She’d wondered if it would be hard to adjust to living back at home full time, after three years at university, and a further three working in Bristol, but there’d been no tension, just a wonderful sense of being where she was meant to be.
So if her father had told her that he and her mum wanted her to leave, she’d have been rocked to her core.
Of course it hadn’t been that, but it had been something just as unexpected.
‘We think you should get in contact with your birth parents.’ This time when Hope’s eyes had widened in surprise at her father’s words, there’d been no playacting involved. The idea that they might want that made her whole body tense up.
‘Why? You’re my parents, I don’t need anyone else.’
‘It’s not about you needing them, Hope.’ Her mother had taken a step closer, putting her hand over Hope’s.
‘It’s about you being able to access all the information you might want, either now, or one day in the future.
We were so worried before you got the haemochromatosis diagnosis, and when you told me the doctor asked you all those questions about your family history, it hit me that I couldn’t give you the answers. ’
‘Lots of people don’t know their genetic history, even the ones who think they do.
’ Hope’s response had sounded defensive even to her own ears, but she didn’t want to be pushed into finding her biological parents.
She was happy, in a family where she felt incredibly loved.
Why would anyone want to risk rejection, when they already had all of that?
Her parents had been open with her that they knew certain information about her birth mother, whose name was Laura, because of the fact they’d fostered Hope before she was adopted.
It meant she’d always known that tracing Laura – should she want to – would be relatively easy.
Her adoption had been finalised just before a change in the law in 2002, which had made the process of tracing birth parents easier, and which had also generally led to there being some form of ongoing communication between birth parents and children.
Instead, David and Alison had followed Laura’s request and maintained ‘letterbox contact’, sending an update and a few photographs to Hope’s birth mother each year, via a designated member of staff at the local authority.
When Hope was old enough, they broached the idea of her taking control of the contact with Laura and she’d told them she didn’t want any direct contact with the woman who’d given birth to her.
She had no idea if Laura would have wanted more than those yearly letters anyway, and her parents had never pushed her.
Until her diagnosis. She’d decided, even then, that she had to make them see it wasn’t nearly as important as they suddenly thought it was.
‘Did you know as many as one in ten people aren’t the child of the man they’ve been told is their biological father?
’ she asked them earnestly. ‘All those people are getting through life thinking they’re having conversations with doctors about their genetic history, when they don’t even really know what it is. ’