‘Four?’ Claire frowned. ‘What happened to her? Did your family split up?’

‘Family?’ She gave a short laugh. ‘I’m not like you…’ She sucked in her breath, trying to hold back the words. Then, slowly she finished the sentence. ‘I’m not like you, Claire.’ She glanced at Simone, who was unusually quiet, and on an impulse she reached out, laid a hand over hers. ‘Or Simone.’ Then, lifting her chin a little. ‘We’re here to raise money for street kids, right? Well, that was me. It’s why I made such a big thing of this fund raiser. Why I’m here.’ Feeling exposed in the way an alcoholic must feel the first time he admitted he had a problem, she said, ‘My real name is Belinda Porter and I was once a street kid.’

She’d never told anyone where she’d come from. Anything about herself. On the contrary, she’d done everything she could to scrub it out of her mind. Not even Ivo knew. He’d had the tidied-up fairy story version of her life: the one with kindly foster parents-who she’d conveniently killed off in a tragic car accident-a business course at the local college-not the straight from school dead-end job in a call centre. Only the lucky break of being drafted in to work the phones on the biggest national fund raising telethon had been true, but then she’d been ‘discovered’ live on air; everyone knew that story.

How could she blame him for a lack of emotional commitment to her when she had kept most of her life hidden from him? A husband deserved more than that.

She swallowed. ‘My mother, my sister, the three of us begged just to live,’ she said. ‘Exactly like the children we’re here to help.’

For a moment no one spoke.