Renée Ballou thought she was a lucky person. In the 1980s, she was living in a beautiful home an hour’s drive from Los Angeles, with a job she loved, a happy marriage and a young son. Everything had always felt so easy for Renée – until she began trying for a second child. Two years on, she still wasn’t pregnant. “I was pretty much used to getting what I wanted,” Renée, now 67, tells me with a sad smile. “It was very stressful.”
Along with her husband, Wesley, Renée went through a battery of tests, followed by years of surgeries, supplements and hormones. Her gynaecologist referred them to Dr Sergio Stone, a fertility specialist at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) in Orange County, for more treatment. They tried artificial insemination – first with Wesley’s sperm, then with a donor – without success. Their son, Matthew, was four when they started trying for a sibling for him; by 1987 he was 10. It was lonely and emotionally and physically gruelling. But Renée refused to give up. “I wanted that baby more than anything.”
Then, Renée seemed to get lucky again. Stone told her that two high-flying South American fertility doctors – Argentine Ricardo Asch and José Balmaceda, a Chilean – had been recently recruited from Texas to work with him at UCI. “They had this miracle programme. They’d had a huge success rate over in San Antonio,” she remembers being told. Asch had developed a groundbreaking new technique called gamete intrafallopian transfer – snappily abbreviated to Gift – where eggs were fertilised inside the fallopian tubes. It was more invasive than IVF (where sperm and egg are made to meet outside the human body) but it appeared to be up to twice as successful, according to research led by Asch, published in the Lancet in 1984. Renée felt incredibly fortunate to have this pioneer arrive on her doorstep.
After the birth of the first IVF baby in 1978, there was a gold rush in private fertility medicine in the US. In California, doctors who promised new techniques with better success rates were able to earn fortunes. Asch was flashy – he owned five racehorses and several beachside mansions, and drove a red Ferrari with the numberplate DR GIFT – and entrepreneurial. He travelled to the Vatican to secure the pope’s blessing for his programme, successfully making the case that his procedure should be more acceptable for the world’s billion Catholics than IVF, because Gift babies were conceived inside the body.
Asch’s waiting room at the Garden Grove Medical Centre was bright, and packed. Renée was impressed. “It wasn’t like you were sitting next to people from Orange County – everybody was flying in from somewhere different,” she remembers. Bills of $10,000 a cycle were not unusual. Many patients paid in cash. (Renée’s costs were covered by the carpet franchise company where she worked.) She was only 30 in 1987; Asch told her she was a great candidate for Gift, that she would easily get pregnant. “I just felt so honoured that he was spending this time with me,” she says. She liked him. “He had a fun side. Which was good, because it’s not a fun process.”
Gift demanded weeks of blood tests, transvaginal ultrasounds and carefully timed daily injections of drugs to stimulate Renée’s ovulation, followed by surgery under general anaesthetic. While Renée was unconscious, Asch harvested 22 eggs from her ovaries, selected four, and placed them into her fallopian tubes along with donor sperm. When Renée woke up after the procedure, Asch said it had all gone brilliantly. “You’re pregnant,” he told her.
But she didn’t feel it. “From the minute I got home, I had an intuition: I just knew I was not pregnant.” The feeling was confirmed by a negative test a few days later. Back in Asch’s office, he was still so optimistic: Renée was such a good candidate for Gift, he said, they should try again. But a feeling of cold resignation came over her. “I just looked at him and said, ‘No. I’m done.’” The most cutting-edge treatment available hadn’t made her pregnant. “If the best didn’t work, why continue? My marriage was deteriorating. At some point, you’ve got to stop.”
Renée and Wesley resolved to move on with their lives. Renée was offered a high-flying job in Sacramento, so the family moved to northern California. Matthew started at a new school; Renée threw herself into her work. But her marriage never recovered. Renée and Wesley divorced in 1992.
Three years later, Renée’s mother died, and Renée decided to move back to southern California to be closer to her friends and family. In October 1995, she was loading the last of her possessions from her Sacramento home into a removals van, when her landline rang. It was a reporter from the Orange County Register.
“Are you alone?” the reporter asked.
“No,” Renée said. Her brother and new partner were helping with the move.
The reporter said Renée should fetch one of them, and find somewhere to sit down. Then she told Renée that the Register was about to publish a story about Asch and Balmaceda, and her name had come up in connection with it.
They had got hold of Renée’s medical records and seen that, while she had been unconscious on Asch’s operating table, he had stolen some of her eggs and given them to another patient without Renée’s knowledge or consent. That woman – a stranger – had gone on to become pregnant and give birth to a son. The baby that Renée had spent six years trying to conceive. The baby she so desperately wanted.
The UCI fertility scandal, as it came to be known, was relatively old news by the time Renée received that phone call. The Orange County Register had been reporting on it for five months, since whistleblowers from Asch and Balmaceda’s clinic first gave journalists photocopied records in May 1995 that revealed eggs were being harvested without patients’ consent. It took years for the full scale of the scandal to emerge, but subsequent investigations by reporters and the authorities at UCI ultimately indicated that at least 137 patients had their eggs or embryos stolen by Asch and Balmaceda, leading to at least 15 live births.
It was an explosive story. Former patients, now victims, gave interviews to Oprah Winfrey, Phil Donahue and Maria Shriver. Some hired private investigators to try to track down the children conceived with their stolen eggs. Loretta and Basilio Jorge, who learned that a woman had given birth to twins believed to be conceived with Loretta’s eggs, made headlines when they sought custody of the six-year-old boy and girl, who they had arranged to have secretly filmed and photographed. The scandal was quickly turned into a schlocky Lifetime cable TV drama.
Renée had already heard about it. Her mother had spotted a People magazine story about the Jorges’ custody battle and, shortly before she died, pointed it out to Renée. “My mom said, ‘Look at this! That’s your doctor!’ I read it. I said, ‘I do not believe it. My doctors would have never done anything like that to me.’ I thought of them as gods. I had them on a pedestal.” She dismissed it as an absurd tabloid story. “I thought it was ridiculous.”
Her eyes are still wide in disbelief, 30 years after taking the phone call in her empty Sacramento home. We are talking in Matthew’s kitchen in Anaheim, Orange County, less than 15 minutes away from where the Garden Grove clinic used to be. Renée speaks slowly and deliberately, as if she is still trying to process it all.
When she hung up the phone to the reporter, she told her brother and her boyfriend what she’d just learned. “They thought that was the best news, that I had this child. I said, ‘Are you effing kidding me? This is horrible.’”
Her mind went back to the forms she had signed in 1987 and how she had explicitly stated that she did not want to donate any of her eggs. “It’s your genetic material. It’s being a mother. Absolutely not.” The reporter faxed her the medical form from UCI the next morning. Renée was named as a “donor”; four of her eggs had been given to another woman whose name had been redacted, and the procedure had resulted in a live birth (marked male).
“Then I thought, what if there’s more that I don’t know about? If there were 22 eggs, she got four and I got four – what if I have more children?” (The subsequent investigation by UCI, which ended four years later, in 1999, concluded that the baby boy was likely to be the only live birth from Renée’s eggs – but no one can be sure.)
Stealing eggs, or using them without permission, was not illegal when Asch and Balmaceda were doing it. They were ultimately charged with fraud and tax evasion, but they fled the US for Mexico and Chile, respectively, in 1995, before they could face justice. The law was changed in the wake of the scandal, and the use of embryos and eggs without consent has been a criminal offence in California since 1996.
The news cycle moved on, but Renée could not. The baby conceived with her stolen egg was seven by the time she found out he existed in 1995. Where was he? And what was she going to do about him?
Carole LieberWilkins, 71, is a marriage and family therapist who works with people using donor conception or surrogacy to create their families. She is one of the first practitioners in the world to specialise in this area – and she came to it for personal reasons.
“I was licensed as a therapist in January of 1984, opened up my office as a general therapist, and seven months later I was diagnosed,” she tells me. Aged only 30, she learned she was going through menopause. “There’s no cure for menopause. If you want to be parents, you’ll have to adopt,” said the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) reproductive endocrinologist who diagnosed her, with a bluntness that still startles Carole as she recalls it 40 years later.
“The diagnosis itself was devastating,” she says. Carole had been married to Don, an architect, for five years. “I had really thought about us having a baby together by that time, even though we weren’t trying.” Don had been ambivalent about becoming a father, but the news galvanised Carole. “The quest to become parents started the day I was diagnosed.”
At the sun-drenched kitchen table of the airy Malibu home she shares with her second husband, Jay, Carole gives the impression of someone who makes things happen. But when it came to fertility treatment, there were no options for women like her in 1984. Two years later, the tactless endocrinologist referred her and Don to an experimental programme at UCLA called “ovum transfer”. It was an early form of egg donation: a donor would be artificially inseminated, with her egg fertilised inside her uterus, but it would be washed out before it had a chance to implant in the lining of her womb, and transferred to the intended mother.
Carole met an adoption lawyer in 1986, in the hope that she and Don might have a child placed with them by early 1987. But being pregnant mattered to her. “I wanted to be a member of a club, and I felt really excluded from that club.” What club? “Women who have given birth. Mommies.” So she signed up for ovum transfer.
She got as far as meeting the woman who had agreed to donate her egg to her and Don; she insisted on it, much to the bewilderment of her doctors at a time when anonymous sperm donation was standard practice. But the ovum transfer programme closed down before they got to participate in it, in large part because the procedure left many of the egg donors accidentally pregnant. Instead, Carole and Don were referred to have a different cutting-edge fertility treatment: the Gift programme at UCI.
“We had an initial consultation with Asch, who said, ‘You’re a perfect candidate, and there’s a six- to 18-month wait.’” The donors, Carole was told, were women undergoing IVF who agreed to give away eggs they couldn’t use; it wasn’t possible to freeze or preserve them in those days, so it made sense to her that a few women might be willing to donate eggs rather than see them perish. But there were far more people seeking eggs than donating them, she was told. So they continued to pursue adoption, figuring that they would use Gift to try for their second child.
Carole’s adopted son, Alex, was born in May 1987. It was an open adoption, which meant that Carole was in close contact with his biological mother, who came to their home and met their extended family. This was pretty radical at the time. “It seemed scary to everybody but us,” Carole smiles.
Exactly a month after Alex’s birth, she got a call from Asch’s office: they had a donor, the woman was having her eggs retrieved at that very moment, and Carole needed to get to the clinic in two hours for her Gift procedure. Carole lived a two-hour drive away, and had a newborn baby in her arms. “I called my mother. I left Alex with her, and we got in the car and drove to Garden Grove.”
She retrieves a scrap of paper from a box file: it’s the note from June 1987 where she had jotted down, in curly cursive writing, what Asch’s office told her on the phone about the donor. “29 y.o. 5’9”. 135[lbs]. Blonde. Medium [build]. Caucasian. Endometriosis. [Works in] Marketing.” Finding out these details mattered to her, even though she had no time to waste getting to the clinic. She kept asking questions when she arrived. “They said, ‘What do you need to know all that for? This is going to be your child. Once they put that baby in your arms, you’ll never think about it again.’”
Did she ask whether the donor had consented? “It never occurred to me to ask that question,” she tells me, quietly. “I’d like to tell you that it did, but it didn’t.”
Two weeks after Asch inserted four eggs into Carole’s fallopian tubes along with Don’s sperm, Carole had a positive pregnancy test. “It was unreal. I just remember walking around saying, ‘Menopausal women don’t get pregnant.’” When did she start to believe it? “When Daniel came out.”
Daniel was born in March 1988. He was an easy baby, Carole says, very sweet, and very blond – in contrast to her own dark features. She has since learned that he is among the first 11 people in the world to have been conceived through egg donation (the first was in Australia, in 1983). But she never felt like a pioneer. She was too busy looking after two sons who were only 10 months apart. “I remember being blissfully happy.”
From the outset, Carole was honest with both her sons about how she came to be their mother. At a time when doctors actively discouraged parents from telling their children they were donor conceived, this was groundbreaking. But it came naturally. “I had adoption books at home for very young children. I have a vivid memory of sitting with one on each side of me. I was reading this book and referencing Alex’s story, and I remember spontaneously turning to Daniel and saying, ‘And you were sort of, kind of, adopted.’ It really was like a 50% adoption to me, and so it just didn’t make any sense not to do that when I was doing it with Alex.”
As Carole started to specialise in therapy for donor conception and surrogacy, she and Asch became colleagues. They went to the same conferences; they bumped into each other at lectures and meetings. She would update him on how the son he helped her give birth to was doing. She even brought Daniel along to a conference in Palm Springs, and he got to meet Asch in person.
Then, at a conference in 1994, Asch took Carole to one side. “He said, ‘The UC Regents are out to get me. You’re going to hear some things about me that are completely untrue. I just want you to know.’ I said, ‘That’s terrible. I’m so sorry.’” She looks me dead in the eye. “The next year was when I got the call from the Orange County Register.”
It would be years before Renée learned Carole’s last name, the name Carole shared with the boy conceived from Renée’s stolen egg. But she didn’t think much about Carole, at first. Instead, she was bothered by the idea that Wesley may have made small talk in the Garden Grove waiting room with whoever-she-was’s husband, a man who would soon be celebrating his wife’s pregnancy, while Renée and Wesley’s marriage disintegrated.
Wesley was horrified by the news. “He felt like I had been wronged, and he had, too,” she says. It was his idea to contact Gloria Allred, one of the most famous and notoriously hard-nosed lawyers in the US, who took them on as clients. As her stolen egg had resulted in a live birth, Renée’s claim against UCI was particularly strong, but the theft was classed as medical malpractice, which limited the amount of compensation she could claim. “Malpractice, to me, is when you cut the wrong kidney out – not when you steal eggs and give them to other people,” she says, bitterly. Renée got $250,000 from UCI – the maximum she could have been entitled to – and an apology.
Allred told Renée she could go further: she could seek custody, or at least visitation rights, over her biological son. “She said, ‘You don’t have to enforce it, but have it, in case you ever need it. What if they pack him up and take him out of the country?’ If they were crazy people, I would have no recourse without it.”
The Orange County Register reporter offered to connect Renée and Carole. The women spoke on the phone, along with Daniel’s father, Don, a few months after they found out what Asch had done.
“They were very cautious, very defensive,” Renée says. “She had some questions. What was I wanting?”
“I was really scared,” Carole says. “Being a nongenetic parent, having gone through infertility, there’s this feeling of, am I entitled to this child? I absolutely thought it was possible that she’d try to get him.”
Carole had everything to lose. She had established herself as an expert therapist in the field of donor conception: what would happen to her career if it emerged that her own child had been conceived from a stolen egg? She knew other victims had hired private investigators to track down their biological children. “We thought reporters would be standing outside our house trying to take a picture of Daniel. We were worried about his safety and security. I remember Don saying something like, ‘She can’t get Daniel, but she can ruin our lives trying.’”
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Allred repeatedly told Renée that she could seek custody or visitation rights. But it was never an option for her, Renée tells me. “If he had been younger – one or two or three, maybe, or even four – I probably would have sought some visitation. But he was seven.” She shakes her head. “I could never do that to him. Or to them. You know, they were victims, too.”
Slowly – tentatively – Renée and Carole began to forge a relationship. At first, they exchanged letters, with Carole’s adoption lawyer acting as their intermediary, because Carole was wary of letting Renée know her home address. Carole wanted to know about Renée’s medical history; Renée wanted to know what Daniel was like.
“He was playing soccer, he was doing well at school. Normal things,” Renée says. She sent photos of herself and Matthew for Carole to show to Daniel, and Carole sent her photos of Daniel. “I’d be so excited when I saw the mail and got the pictures. But it was heartbreaking to see him. I would cry, because I’d see a lot of Matthew in him.” Renée told Carole about her struggle with alcoholism. She has been sober since 2004, but tells me that, at her worst, she was drinking three bottles of wine a night, alone.
Carole agreed to test Daniel’s DNA. “My brother said, ‘She’s going to swab the dog’s mouth,’” Renée says. “And I said, ‘No, she’s not.’ I trusted her, and she trusted me. People don’t send you pictures and answer your letters and then become a liar. Everything she said she was going to do, she did, and everything I said I was going to do, I did.” The DNA results confirmed Daniel was Renée’s son.
When Daniel was eight, Renée and Carole were speaking on the phone and, out of the blue, Carole asked Renée if she’d like to talk to him. (Carole tells me she thought nothing of this – she used to pass the phone over to Alex so that he could chat to his biological mother. Why not do the same with Daniel?)
“I got on the phone and I said, ‘Hi Daniel. How are you?’” Renée says. They chatted about football, school, friends – the kind of conversation any adult would make with an eight-year-old boy. “I kept him on the phone for a few minutes. When I got off, I just bawled. But I was so happy that she let me have that conversation with him. For all she knew, I could have just gone crazy and said, ‘I’m your mommy.’ She totally trusted me.” Renée shakes her head in disbelief.
Against the odds, in a country where contracts and threats of litigation define every complex relationship, Renée and Carole chose to have faith in each other’s goodness. Renée never tried to track Daniel down; Carole never withheld Daniel from Renée.
When Carole first learned what had happened at Asch’s clinic, she sought advice from a high-powered attorney. “He said, ‘Lawyer up, baby. Lawyer up,’ she tells me, fixing me with her eyes. “I don’t know why, but I then called a different attorney, a female attorney. And she said, ‘What does Renée want? Talk to her.’ It changed my life.” Renée wanted Daniel to know who she was, and that she would like to meet him once he was ready. Nothing more. “The amount of restraint on Renée’s part is really extraordinary.”
They continued to exchange letters and occasional phone calls. Eventually, Carole ditched the intermediary and let Renée know her full name and address. Carole and Don got divorced; both she and Renée remarried, and Renée invited Daniel to her wedding. “He was 13 or 14,” Carole says, “I told him about it – it was a few years after Jay and I got married – and he said, ‘I didn’t want to go to your wedding. Why would I want to go to hers?’ So he didn’t go.”
Several years into their relationship, Carole was due to go to a conference near where Renée was living, and she suggested they meet in person for the first time, in a restaurant. “We chat, we’re both very nervous,” Carole remembers. “And then Renée says, ‘Put out your hand. I have something for you.’ So I put out my hand.” Carole reaches down for her purse and takes something from it, which she drops into my hand, just as Renée once placed it into hers. “Renée says, ‘This is my nine-year AA chip. I never would have made it without you.’” She takes it back from me, quickly. “I carry it everywhere with me. It’s extremely meaningful to me. That was really the beginning of a different kind of relationship.”
But Daniel didn’t want a relationship with Renée. He wasn’t interested, aged 18, when Carole first mentioned that his biological mother really wanted to meet him. Renée put it down to his age. “A lot of 18-year-old boys don’t want to have a relationship with one mother, let alone two,” she laughs. She hoped he’d change his mind by the time he was 21. “Then that passed. And I thought, well, maybe when he finds a woman, because you know how women get people together … ”
Daniel’s father, Don, died in 2008. Daniel became a video-game software engineer, moved to Germany, moved back to Los Angeles, turned 30 in 2018, and married his German wife in 2019. Carole sent Renée pictures of the wedding, with Daniel’s consent. Every so often, Carole would ask him if he was interested in meeting Renée. He never was.
“Honestly, I don’t know why,” Daniel Wilkins, now 36, tells me with a deep sigh. “I think it’s kind of selfishness. I hate to say it. I’m not a parent, so I don’t have that connection to what it would be like.” We’re speaking over Zoom; he’s in Bavaria visiting his in-laws, and as soon as he appears on my screen I am struck by how much he shares Renée’s slim face. But Daniel says he never had any curiosity about his genetic ancestry. “I didn’t think it was such a big deal,” he shrugs.
Carole had always been so upfront about how she came to be his mother, and it left Daniel with no desire to know who his biological mother was. “There’s not a ton of drama around this for me because it was always out in the open.” He can’t even remember being told that he had been conceived from an egg that was stolen rather than donated. He assumes it must have been sometime in his teens. “It’s interesting that I can’t remember when we delineated between those two,” he muses. “But I do know that it was in a way that was just not very shocking.”
(Carole remembers, of course. “I was really scared to tell him,” she says, her voice low. “I was afraid that he would feel tainted.” But Daniel was far too pragmatic to take the circumstances of his conception personally. “His response was completely the opposite from what I feared.”)
But Daniel’s wife, Laura, was curious. And, as she began to Google Asch and the scandal, she found an interview where Renée spoke about the pain of never knowing the son created from her stolen egg. With Laura’s encouragement, Daniel sent Renée an email. And then, last year, they had a Zoom call.
Before he logged on, Daniel was nervous. “In my life, I can pick and choose – I can hire people that I like to work with, I can be around friends that I like. Family, not so much,” he tells me. “I was afraid that we weren’t going to get along. There’s all that pressure to materialise into someone she’d been thinking about for all these years. There was this connection that she missed, and I didn’t feel like there was a part of me missing.” But he needn’t have worried. “She was lovely,” he grins. They spoke for about an hour, with Laura joining at the end.
“It was wonderful,” Renée beams. “He had his notebook, I had my notebook. He asked some really good questions.” Renée told him about her life, her best friends, her hobbies. “Afterwards, I was walking on air.”
“She seemed a lot more young and hip than I was expecting – jetskiing and stuff like that,” Daniel says, “and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s super badass.’ I was really intrigued, because my birth mom – my mom! – you’d never catch her dead on a jetski. So that was really cool.”
Just before Christmas 2024, after waiting nearly three decades, Renée finally got to meet Daniel in person. The moment itself was anticlimactic: they bumped into each other in the parking lot of the Long Beach steak house where they had agreed to have dinner. Daniel arrived with Laura, Renée came with her boyfriend – her second marriage having ended in divorce – and with Matthew and his wife.
“I went up to all of them and give them a big hug,” Daniel says.
“We hugged, we hugged, we hugged,” Renée tells me, her eyes shut. “It was just wonderful hugging my son.”
Daniel was struck by his half-brother’s narrow face and high cheekbones. Then he looked at Renée, and realised that it all came from her.
“It was like seeing long-lost friends, or long-lost family,” she continues, her hand on her heart. “No one talked about the past. We just talked about current and future things. We talked and talked and talked.”
At one point, the waiter came over to ask if they were celebrating anything. “I kind of just froze – like, are we?” Daniel says. “How does one put a label on what this is?”
They never spoke about what had happened at UCI – to the extent that Renée still doesn’t know that Carole has told Daniel that the egg used to create him was stolen. But, from their first conversation on Zoom, Renée wanted him to know how she felt about him. “I said, ‘Your mom doesn’t really think of me as your mother, but I do. She’s your mother, she raised you, that will never be taken away of from her. But I also think of you as my son.’”
When I ask Carole how she describes Renée’s relationship to Daniel, her answer is immediate. “Genetic mother,” she replies. “It took me a while to integrate the word ‘mother’.” For a long time, she didn’t know how to frame it: Renée can’t be called an egg donor, because she never donated. “There is no language for this. There really isn’t.”
“I consider Carole part of my family. And we are family,” Renée says, her fingers drawing branches of a family tree on the table in front of her. “It’s different, but we are a family.”
Daniel doesn’t seem to know how to feel about Asch. “I feel sorry that he affected other people’s lives. Personally, I’m happy I’m here, which would not have been the case if he didn’t do what he did. I’m not grateful at all to him, but I wouldn’t say I’m angry … I’m angry on behalf of other people whose lives were uprooted.”
Despite repeated attempts to extradite him to the US to face justice, Asch is still living in Mexico and practising as a fertility specialist, even though, as success rates for IVF have continued to improve, Gift has fallen out of favour. In a 2019 Tedx talk, Asch waxes lyrical on his career helping people create their families, omitting to mention all the nonconsensual families like Carole and Renée’s that he also created. Balmaceda – whose son is the Game of Thrones actor Pedro Pascal – returned to the US to receive a plea deal over tax fraud charges in 2022.
“Asch had no consequences. And we’re all stuck picking up the pieces,” Renée says.
“But, deep down, I really feel like the doctors were doing it to help more people have babies. I don’t think they were doing it maliciously, I really don’t. They had all the money they needed at that point.” She shrugs. “I could be totally wrong.” Perhaps it is easier for her to live with the idea they were motivated by compassion rather than malice or money.
Carole has a different take. “It was ego, arrogance, God complex,” she says, simply. “Asch is still doing egg donation. That’s been making me crazy for 30 years.”
The UCI fertility scandal may sound like a product of its time. But don’t be fooled, Renée says. “It seems like every week I read about incidents where people went through IVF and got the wrong baby, or it wasn’t the sperm it was supposed to be. IVF is a good thing, but people need to know that things can go wrong.”
Carole is clear about the power of assuming good faith – and the benefits of being honest with donor-conceived children, even in the most fraught circumstances. “I really believe that genetic identity matters. You’re always going to be their mommy. As I tell my clients, children don’t reject their parents because they don’t share DNA – they reject them for other reasons! The truth will set you free.”
Daniel says he is looking forward to getting to know Renée better. “When we were leaving the restaurant, he said, ‘Let’s do this again.’ That warmed my heart,” she tells me, with tears in her eyes.
After years of restraint and patience, of never trying to find out where Daniel lived, never Googling him, never stalking him on social media, after decades of respecting what Carole and Daniel want, Renée is finally reaping the rewards. “It’s been a very hard journey. But if I had done things differently, I might never have got to this day.”
The older he gets, Daniel tells me, the more grateful he is for his two mothers, who both wanted him so much.
“I’m thankful for the way things unfolded, and the way they both handled it,” he says. “I had some fears about meeting Renée. But how could she not be a decent, lovely person, having allowed me a normal childhood – even though it came at the cost of her own happiness.”
