Chapter 3
3
For as long as she could remember, it had been just Courtney and her mother trying to make their way together in a cold, tough world.
Sharon Flynn was a hard-working single mother and the centre of Courtney’s universe. Life wasn’t easy, but they made the best of things and managed to make ends meet. Their rented terraced house in Southampton was no palace, but they kept it clean and tidy and homely. Sharon worked two, sometimes three, jobs to put food on the table, and although there was never any spare money for luxuries like holidays or a car or expensive gadgets, Courtney was never hungry growing up and never without decent clothes to wear at school.
It was only later when she thought back and remembered all the times her mother had passed on mealtimes, claiming she wasn’t hungry or had to rush off to work, that she understood that Sharon had certainly sacrificed her own needs for her daughter’s. Courtney ached to think of her mother’s selfless acts, performed too many times to count, and ached to think, too, about what they might have cost her.
As a child, Courtney thought her mother was invincible. A force of nature. But once she reached her later teenage years, she began to see the cracks in the fa?ade. By the time she was in her twenties, her mother’s fatigue was impossible to miss. Years of working multiple jobs, hard physical jobs like cleaning and care work and waitressing and pulling pints in busy pubs all took their toll. Skimping on meals in order to feed her daughter only added to the burden.
Even once Courtney left school and found a job working in an office and was able to bring home a decent wage, Sharon still had to keep working multiple jobs. Bills kept going up, prices kept going up, and things only seemed to get harder. Sharon’s insistence that Courtney save some of her wages so she could afford to attend college and earn a proper qualification one day only made Courtney feel guilty.
But her protests fell on deaf ears. Sharon refused to accept more of Courtney’s wages to help cover their household costs and kept working as hard as ever. Not even a nasty spell of winter illness earlier that year stopped her turning up for her early morning shifts as a hotel cleaner before putting in another shift in the late afternoon and evening working behind the bar in a pub.
When Courtney, alarmed by her mother’s pale skin and obvious exhaustion, begged her to see a doctor and get some treatment for her lingering illness, Sharon refused, insisting it was just a routine winter bug that would vanish in its own good time.
Of all the ‘what ifs’ in Courtney’s mind, perhaps this one loomed the largest. What if she’d insisted her mother see a doctor? What if she’d dragged her to the GP surgery herself? What if she’d forced her mother to take time off work to recover from her bout of ill health, and damn the financial consequences?
Those what-if questions would haunt her for the rest of her life.
Perhaps if she hadn’t been wrestling with the completely unexpected drama she’d tumbled into herself, Courtney might have acted differently when faced with her mother’s poor health. But by the time Sharon was battling with the winter virus that showed no signs of leaving her alone, Courtney was already five-and-a-half months pregnant and terrified out of her wits.
Falling pregnant was an accident. Falling for Oliver Redman was the mistake that caused it.
She’d only known Oliver for a few weeks before she found herself head over heels, if not in love then certainly in infatuation. Oliver was charming and handsome, a car salesman who knew how to persuade with silky and lethal efficiency. Not that it had taken much persuasion to talk her into bed.
Courtney had jumped in willingly. Eagerly. Boys had never paid her much attention in school, and despite a few scattered dates here and there as a teenager, by the time she hit her twenties her experiences with the opposite sex remained few and far between.
And then along came Oliver Redman, who flattered her and made her feel special and told her she was beautiful, and she lapped up every word.
Three months after they first got together, Courtney discovered she was pregnant. Sitting in the bathroom staring at the pregnancy test as tears streamed down her face, she couldn’t understand how it had happened. They’d been careful. She wasn’t a fool.
But being smart or foolish apparently had nothing to do with it, because there were two lines on the pregnancy test and no matter how many tests she did, those same two lines just kept appearing.
Shock set in. For a few days, she tried to pretend those two lines had never appeared on those pregnancy tests. If she ignored it, perhaps the problem would go away.
Once the shock passed, realisation dawned. This wasn’t a problem she could ignore. And it wasn’t a problem she should face alone, either.
On a rainy afternoon in late September, Courtney met Oliver at the car showroom where he worked, and during his lunch hour he drove them both to the quiet country park where they often went to be alone. Summoning her courage, she told him she was pregnant.
Oliver stared for a long beat, his eyes growing wide. Then he let out a sharp laugh and said, “It’s not mine, is it?”
If he’d stabbed her through the heart, it couldn’t have hurt more than those harsh words and that cruel laugh.
“Of course it’s yours!” she said. Remembering her own stunned reaction to the discovery, she reminded herself that Oliver would need time to absorb the news she’d just given him.
But it turned out she was wrong about that.
“You’ll have to get rid of it,” Oliver said, his tone implacable. “That’s all there is to it.”
Until that moment, Courtney had known there was a choice to make—to keep the baby or not keep the baby. Both choices terrified her. She hadn’t wanted to end up pregnant in the first place, and wondering what to do now that she was pregnant filled her with white hot fear.
But listening to Oliver telling her what to do, instructing her on what to do, caused something to shift inside her.
“What if I don’t want to get rid of it ?” she said, hating those words in her mouth, hating how ‘get rid of it’ sounded like she was taking out the trash.
Oliver shrugged and shook his head. “This isn’t my problem. It’s your problem. We were just supposed to be having a bit of fun. I didn’t sign up for anything else.”
The miserable conversation, such as it was, continued for a few more minutes as the rain poured down outside the car. Oliver’s position was clear; if she chose to have the baby, he wanted nothing to do with it. When he dropped her off back at her house fifteen minutes later, Courtney knew it would be the last time she’d see him.
That night, she told her mother about the pregnancy and about Oliver’s reaction. Just as she knew she would, Sharon reacted with shock and surprise—how could she not?—and then quickly gathered her daughter into her arms and comforted her.
“We’ll figure it out,” Sharon soothed. “Whatever you want to do, whatever decision you want to make, we’ll figure it out.”
Her mother’s support and kindness meant the world to her. She hadn’t expected Oliver to get down on bended knee when she told him she was pregnant, but she hadn’t expected him to just walk away.
Courtney thought about her options. Thought about the choice she had to make. The words Oliver had spat at her when he’d told her to ‘get rid of it’ gnawed inside her head.
She tried to weigh the decision logically, tried to think about the choice of terminating the pregnancy compared to the choice of having the baby and becoming a mother.
A single mother, like her own mother had been, with all the challenges that came with it.
It was only after several more days had passed and she’d booked an appointment with her GP and begun rehearsing what she planned to say when the appointment arrived that Courtney realised she’d already made the decision.
She would keep the baby. She wanted to keep the baby. Her child had already found its way inside her heart.
“Everything will be fine,” Sharon said with a gentle smile when Courtney told her what she’d decided. “We’ll make it work and everything will be fine.”
With the choice made, Courtney began to prepare. Becoming a first-time mother aged just twenty-three years-old had never been part of her plan, but she wasn’t a child, nor was she some clueless teenager. She had a smart head on her shoulders and wasn’t afraid of hard work, and if she put her time and energy to good use, she could make sure she was ready for her baby arriving.
She asked for extra shifts at the office where she worked as an administrative assistant in a local home furnishing business, helping to deal with sales paperwork and organising delivery schedules. Already working full time during the week, she begged for—and convinced the manager to give her—additional hours on the weekends working on the shop floor, serving customers and taking their orders and covering for staff illness and holidays.
The extra money in her monthly salary went straight into a savings account to pay for all the things she’d have to buy before her baby arrived. With thrifty purchases and careful budgeting, along with some rummaging in the charity shop to plug the gaps, Courtney reckoned that by the time her baby was born she’d have most of the things she needed and hopefully a little cash safety net to see her through maternity leave.
There was still plenty to think about further down the line, such as how she would afford child care in order to go back to work, and whether between herself and her mother they could juggle their jobs and their lives to keep the paid child care hours to a minimum. But that problem still lay far in the future and Courtney reckoned that, unless she wanted to descend into a panic-induced frenzy of worry, she should focus on dealing with what was already immediately in front of her instead of still many months away.
She’d work extra shifts, stash the extra cash, scrimp and save and do everything in her power to be ready for her baby arriving. With her mother’s support, they’d make it work and their little family of two would become a little family of three.
Planning and focus turned Courtney’s worries and fears into excitement and joy at the prospect of becoming a mother.
And then one day, disaster struck.
On a bitter January morning, Sharon collapsed at work while stripping beds in the hotel where she was on the early cleaning crew. Understaffed and battling to meet their finishing times for turning around the rooms, the other cleaners didn’t realise anything was wrong until they went searching for her when she failed to start work on the next floor of the hotel.
They found her cleaning cart in the doorway of the room she’d been turning and found Sharon on the floor, out of view behind the bed. The alarm was raised and an ambulance was called, but by then the massive stroke Sharon suffered had already done its deadly damage.
Two days later, Sharon died in the intensive care unit at the hospital. Courtney was at her bedside, holding her hand and praying for a miracle that never came. Shock and grief and heartbreak left her reeling and barely able to process what had happened.
Those terrible days morphed one into another as Courtney dealt with the grim bureaucracy of death. There was paperwork to be sorted, the funeral to be organised, people to be informed.
As a quiet woman who lived for her daughter and her work, Sharon had few close contacts, just a handful of friends and some acquaintances from her jobs, which meant that letting people know what had happened was surprisingly quick. Sharon’s parents had died many years before, and she had no siblings or other close family. Some friends of Courtney’s attended the funeral and offered their condolences, insisting she ask if she needed help of any kind.
But the funeral mostly passed in a blur of freezing winter rain and leaden skies as Courtney’s heart ached and tears streamed down her cheeks. When she returned home afterwards, the emptiness of the house and the realisation that her mother would never again walk through the door pierced Courtney’s heart all over again.
People were kind to her. Neighbours brought casseroles, friends called up to check on her, her colleagues and manager at work sent flowers. Courtney was grateful, but none of those thoughtful gestures helped ease her pain.
Nor stopped her from feeling utterly alone in the world.
Accidentally pregnant, about to become a single parent, and having just buried her mother, Courtney thought she’d hit rock bottom.
But it turned out she was wrong about that. There was rock bottom… and then there were the untold depths of misery lurking beneath it.
Just a few short days after her mother’s funeral, a letter from the landlord arrived in the post. In clipped, official language, it informed her that as the tenant had deceased, the landlord would now seek new tenants and that any relatives of the deceased tenant must vacate the property.
As she read the letter, Courtney was gripped by cold panic along with a weary dread. The idea of searching for a new place to live, just days after her mother’s funeral and with the grief still raw, left her reeling.
A phone call to the letting agent who handled the property only confirmed what Courtney had already worked out for herself—she couldn’t afford to rent the house by herself. Quite how her mother had managed it before Courtney began contributing to the household finances remained a mystery. Even if Courtney searched for housemates to split the rent with her, the landlord was putting the price up anyway, pushing it beyond anything she could ever imagine being able to afford.
A quick discussion with the letting agent only proved there was nothing on their books she could afford at all. She found rooms to rent in shared properties, but the owners lost all enthusiasm once they realised Courtney was pregnant and would soon have a crying baby to look after in the property. Other options she found were dirty or grubby, or in unsafe areas, or came with other tenants who gave Courtney the creeps.
Her friends commiserated, and a few even offered her their sofas to sleep on for a night or two, but it wasn’t a long-term solution. With a baby on the way, Courtney needed somewhere to live that didn’t involve sofa-surfing and relying on the goodwill of friends who had their own lives and their own problems to deal with.
In the end, she had no choice but to seek help from the council’s housing service. The case worker she was assigned found temporary accommodation in a bedsit that would prevent Courtney becoming homeless while a more suitable property was found. As an expectant mother, Courtney was assured she’d take priority, but the case worker also explained that with the pressures faced by the social housing sector, it might take time to find somewhere else for her to live.
The bedsit, on a run-down street near Southampton city centre, was noisy and dirty and unpleasant—but with no other choice, Courtney moved in.
It took a huge effort to empty the house she’d shared with her mother of all their belongings, even with help from friends. There were only a few days to clear the rooms before the landlord took possession, and Courtney worked long into the evenings while juggling her job to get it all done. They hadn’t owned much that was valuable, and the furniture they did have was old and worn, but with no space at the bedsit for any of her possessions beyond the basics, Courtney made the hard decision to spend some of her dwindling cash on a storage unit.
The money she’d been saving to pay for all the things her baby would need when she arrived had already been decimated in order to pay for her mother’s funeral. Despite keeping the costs to a minimum and hating herself for having to be so frugal, the costs for the coffin and the funeral service and the cremation had still been eye-watering. In the blink of an eye, the two thousand pounds Courtney had worked so hard to save was reduced to little more than a few hundred.
Spending what was left on a storage unit for furniture and non-essentials and keepsakes struck her as ludicrous. But when she finally got her own place to live, she’d need all those things eventually—kitchen items, towels and linens, a decent bed, a sofa to sit on. Crazy though it was to spend money on storing the items, it seemed crazier to sell off or donate the items to charity, only to have to buy everything all over again when money would surely be even tighter than it was right now.
And so Courtney moved most of the possessions and furniture from the house she’d shared with her mother into storage and then moved herself into the bedsit.
Her first days living in the small, grubby room were hard and lonely. Knowing her precious belongings were safely tucked away in a storage unit, waiting for better times to come, kept Courtney’s spirits up and helped her focus on the future. When grief threatened to overwhelm her, she turned her mind to her day-to-day tasks at work and to dealing with the endless benefit forms she was now filling out and which would, together, just about keep her head above water financially—well, at least until the baby came.
And she turned her mind, too, to the unexpected newspaper clippings she’d found amongst her mother’s belongings while clearing out the house—clippings that revealed shocking information about her father that Courtney had never known…
As the child of a single mother who loved her fiercely, Courtney never thought much about the absence of a father from her life when she was younger. All she knew was that her father had died in a car crash when Courtney was little more than a toddler, and that her parents had no longer been in a relationship when Courtney was born, but Sharon didn’t have much to say about Steven Austin beyond this. The older she got, the more Courtney wondered why her mother never spoke of him, and why she was always the one to prompt her with questions.
A thoughtful and kind child, she assumed her father’s death in a car accident had been a terrible blow for her mother and that it hurt Sharon to talk about it, even if the two of them hadn’t been together anymore. Perhaps Sharon had pined for a reconciliation that never came?
The actual truth of the situation emerged once Courtney was in her teenage years and going through a difficult rebellious streak. Demanding to know more about her tragically killed father, and what he was like and what sort of man he’d been, it infuriated her when Sharon kept her responses vague. In a fit of temper one night, Courtney accused her mother of being cruel by refusing to tell her more about her father, and said she’d start searching online for the answers her mother refused to provide.
Courtney remembered how Sharon’s face had paled at this threat. The explanation that followed helped her understand exactly why.
Steven Austin, it turned out, was not the fallen hero of Courtney’s imagination, a man taken tragically too young. Instead, he was a low-level criminal and drug user who’d spent years in and out of prison for burglary and drug possession. But he was a charmer, too, and a man disposed to regular flashes of optimism about his future and his alleged desire to turn his life around.
Sharon explained how she’d met him while working behind the bar in a pub. Steven came across as a fun and lively guy and easily charmed Sharon into going out with him. For a few weeks, Steven was a regular at the pub, chatting with her while she served customers, and treating her to takeaway Chinese food at the end of her long evening shifts, the two of them sharing kung po chicken and noodles at midnight before slipping into bed together.
Courtney was mesmerised by the story and by the sweet romance of their brief affair. Sharon, too, had been enthralled, just a young woman in her twenties having a lovely fling with a man who made her laugh with his funny jokes and made her heart flip with his charming smile.
But all wasn’t what it seemed. After a few weeks together, Steven seemed to change. The easy humour that had lured Sharon in to begin with was suddenly in short supply, and whenever they were together, she couldn’t help but notice the cagey look in his eyes, his strange restlessness, his odd moods.
They’d once seen each other almost daily, but Steven stopped visiting the pub where Sharon worked and stopped dropping by her flat. Phone calls and messages dwindled to nothing. Hurt and confused, Sharon thought it was a cowardly way to break up with someone. They might only have been together for a few short weeks, but if Steven had changed his mind about their relationship, he could at least have had the good grace to tell her to her face.
Then, in the space of only a couple of days, Sharon learned two stunning facts.
Number one, she was pregnant.
Number two, Steven hadn’t just wandered out of her life—he’d been recalled to prison after breaching the terms of his early release licence.
Sharon had known nothing about Steven having spent time in prison. The news, delivered in passing by a regular at the pub where she worked, came as a complete bolt from the blue. When she further learned that he’d been arrested on suspicion of theft and found to be in possession of drugs—crack cocaine, no less—Sharon couldn’t have been more stunned.
Steven Austin, it turned out, had a history of low-level crime and drug convictions, stealing to pay for his habit and getting involved in any number of dodgy activities in order to earn a bit of cash. It wasn’t the first time he’d had a brush with the law, or spent time in prison, and then resolved to turn things around, according to the pub regular who told Sharon what was going on.
She only wished the pub regular had said something sooner. She would never have got involved with someone who’d just come out of prison, and who had a long criminal record. The idea of it appalled her.
But their brief affair hadn’t exactly been anyone else’s business. Few of the pub regulars likely even knew they were seeing one another. It had only been a casual bit of fun, anyway.
Except that what had started as a romantic fling had ended with Sharon pregnant and with the father of her child being hauled off to prison. Realising the mistake she’d made by getting involved with Steven Austin in the first place, a man who’d vanished from her life without saying a word in order to return to a drug habit he couldn’t kick, Sharon understood she was better off without him.
Just as Courtney would do almost twenty-four years later, Sharon weighed the choice she’d have to make about her accidental pregnancy—and then decided to keep her child.
As a teenager, Courtney had listened to this story with dismay. The father she’d imagined inside her head bore no resemblance to the one Sharon described. It wasn’t easy to absorb her mother’s story or the explanation for why she was only now hearing it, even if she understood intellectually why Sharon would have chosen to keep the truth of her father’s wayward life from her for so long.
Sharon also admitted that when Steven was recalled to prison, she made the decision not to tell him about the pregnancy. He’d already begun vanishing from her life before he was arrested, and she’d seen a dark side to the man in the final days of their relationship that made her realise she wanted nothing more to do with him. Steven’s attempt to turn things around had clearly only lasted a brief time before he’d returned to the life he’d led before. If he hadn’t been sent back to prison, Sharon knew their relationship would have ended, anyway.
Which meant the last thing she intended to do was tell Steven she’d fallen pregnant with his child.
She never saw him again and never heard from him again, either. When he died in a car crash a few years later, and just a few short weeks after once again being released from yet another spell in prison, he’d known nothing about the daughter Sharon had given birth to.
It had taken the teenage Courtney time to adjust to this new understanding of who her father had been. Part of her wished she’d never asked and raged against the knowledge she now possessed.
But another part of her, the compassionate and loving part of her, couldn’t help but feel sorrow for her mother and the choice she’d had to make following the shock discovery of the sort of man Steven Austin truly was. A fun, brief romantic affair had turned sinister and sour as Steven’s true personality had begun to emerge—and then Sharon’s entire life had been turned upside down when she’d become pregnant.
Eight years on from that world-changing conversation with her mother, Courtney made the massive discovery that caused her to question whether Sharon had told her the entire truth about her father.
While clearing out the house they’d shared in preparation for vacating the only home she’d ever known, Courtney found an old folder of documents in amongst her mother’s things. At first glance, the folder appeared to contain nothing much of note; old employment paperwork, letters of reference, some benefits documents from years earlier, the sorts of things people keep hold of for a while just in case they are ever needed. Courtney was about to bin the lot when something fell out from amongst the musty paperwork and fluttered to the floor.
It was a newspaper clipping, a very old newspaper clipping, the paper thin and yellowing, the ink smudged. The image of the man’s face in the photograph on the clipping sent a puzzled frown across Courtney’s forehead even as she leaned down to pick the clipping up from the floor.
The man in the news clipping image looked just like her father.
As Sharon’s relationship with Steven Austin pre-dated smart phones and the easy capturing of digital photographs, she had few photos of the man in her possession. The only photographs Courtney had seen were a few shots taken on an old camera that belonged to Sharon, and which she’d had printed out. The candid shots showed Steven Austin grinning across the bar of the pub where Sharon had worked when they met, and sitting on the sofa in the tiny flat where Sharon lived at the time, smiling for the camera.
Between their short-lived affair and Steven being arrested and sent back to prison, it was a wonder Sharon had any photos at all. Even after she found out the truth about her father’s chaotic life and criminal record, Courtney still treasured those half-dozen photographs of the father she never knew.
The father who’d died in a car crash when she was just a toddler.
Or so she always believed.
The yellowed newspaper clipping Courtney picked up from the floor that day told a different story about the death of Steven Austin.
The headline in the Southampton newspaper read, ‘Local man murdered in London street attack.’
With mounting dread and horror, Courtney read the brief story contained in the newspaper article. In clipped, crisp sentences, it recounted a brutal late-night incident in north-west London that left a man dead from multiple stab wounds. The victim was identified as Steven Austin, known to have lived briefly in the Southampton area after being released from prison for drug offences six weeks prior to his death. The article speculated that Mr Austin had relocated to the London area, and that police were pursuing various lines of inquiry as part of their investigation into his death, including the theory that he may have been acquainted with his attackers. Anyone with information was asked to contact the investigation team on a special hotline number.
Courtney read the article several times before the details started to sink in.
All her life, she thought her father had died in a car accident. According to this ancient news clipping, he’d instead been murdered . Stabbed to death on a dark street in London.
Murdered. The idea froze the blood in Courtney’s veins.
For a long, agonising moment, Courtney railed at her mother for keeping this information from her. Despite her grief at Sharon’s passing, despite the painful punch of loss she felt every moment of every day, she suddenly felt nothing but hot anger that her mother had kept her in the dark.
Only once impotent fury passed and reason returned did she concede the very obvious explanation for why Sharon hadn’t told her the truth about her father’s death.
How could a mother ever tell her child that her father had been stabbed to death and left to die on the street in the dead of night? What sort of mother would inflict nightmares on her daughter by sharing information about such a traumatic demise?
It had taken years for Sharon to tell Courtney the truth about Steven’s drug habit, his time in prison, and the chaotic life he’d led. Courtney had had to drag even that much out of her. If Sharon had kept the awful and devastating news about Steven’s violent murder from her, then surely it was only to protect her?
Steven was long dead. Knowing the truth about his death—about his gruesome murder—wouldn’t change anything. Courtney remembered how she’d reacted after Sharon finally told her the truth about Steven’s drug use and criminality. It had crushed her to know who her father really was.
How much more would it have crushed her to learn the grim truth about his brutal death?
While these questions raced around Courtney’s head, she set the yellowed newspaper article to one side and shuffled the rest of the old paperwork back inside the folder in which she’d found it. Too shaken up to dispose of the pile of papers as she’d intended, she needed a minute to gather herself together.
As she stuffed the paperwork into the folder, her hands shaking, some sheets flew free and spilled onto the table top where she was working.
Which was when Courtney got her second big shock of the day.
On a piece of torn notepaper, she saw a name and address printed in her mother’s familiar handwriting. Picking it up, she saw the name written there, Colin Austin, beside an address in the town of Hamblehurst, a few dozen miles north-east of Southampton.
Colin Austin. Who was Colin Austin?
Was Colin Austin some relation of her father, Steven? Surely he had to be? The surname said it all, didn’t it? Why else would her mother have kept the scribbled details of a man with the surname Austin unless he was related to Steven? Was he Steven’s father? Brother? Cousin?
Had her mother met this man, this mysterious Colin?
Was there family out there on her father’s side that Courtney never knew existed? Was this yet another huge secret her mother had kept from her?
One question after another tumbled through her head. While still absorbing the truth about her father’s death, she thought constantly about the name and address scribbled on the piece of paper she’d found and whether she ought to contact the man noted there, this man known only as Colin Austin.
After several days of back and forth, she opted for the middle ground and searched for the man online first of all. It took barely a few minutes for Google to inform her that the Colin Austin she was probably looking for worked as a part-time lecturer at Hamblehurst College. The college website quickly yielded a direct phone number for man, along with a photograph on his staff page.
Despite the passage of years, the man’s likeness to the twenty-year-old photograph of her late father was impossible to miss. Colin Austin looked like he was somewhere in his fifties or sixties, which made Courtney more certain than ever that he was probably her father’s brother. He had a warm smile and kind eyes and the look of a man who’d lived a good and full life. According to his staff webpage, he taught classes for students studying courses on NHS management and administration, and before his role at the college he’d worked as a senior NHS manager in a local hospital trust.
With this information in hand, Courtney spent several more days debating what she should do next. Caught in the midst of moving out of her home and into the depressing bedsit her housing officer had found for her, she had enough to occupy her thoughts without adding the prospect of meeting long-lost family into the mix.
What if Colin Austin was cut from the same cloth as his criminal and drug-addicted brother? There was enough chaos in her life already without inviting in even more.
Genuine though this fear was, Courtney felt fairly confident setting it aside. If Colin Austin was gainfully employed as a college lecturer in a responsible job that carried authority, surely that must prove he was no chaotic layabout or chronic substance abuser?
But what if she got in touch and this man, her uncle , said he didn’t want anything to do with her?
The idea of rejection was scary. After losing her mother so suddenly, and only just getting over the humiliation of Oliver Redman turning his back on her when she revealed her pregnancy, Courtney didn’t want to risk any more heartache.
But the desire to find answers to the many, many questions she had overrode the fear.
She wanted to know if her mother had ever met Colin Austin, and if so, why she’d never told Courtney about him. She wanted to know more about the father she’d never known, and find out what had caused him to go off the rails in life, and get to the bottom of the truth about his death and what had happened on that dark London street on the night he was killed. If anyone could now help answer those questions, it was Colin Austin.
And above all this, she wanted to know if she had any family left out there in the world after all. With her mother gone, she had no blood relatives left, at least none she knew of. Stumbling across the old newspaper clipping and the scribbled name and address of a man who must surely be her father’s brother was, she figured, one last chance at finding family she never knew existed.
Finally, after much thought, she took the plunge and called the number for Colin Austin’s office at Hamblehurst College. Her voice shaking when the man answered the phone on the other end, she introduced herself and explained that she was the daughter of Steven Austin, a man she suspected might be Colin’s relative.
That first phone call wasn’t easy. Colin Austin was obviously stunned by what she told him. But over the course of several phone calls and face-to-face meetings, the facts became clear.
Colin was Steven’s brother. The two men had had a difficult relationship and Steven’s wild ways and drug use and time spent in prison had driven a wedge deep into the Austin family. By the time Steven died, they’d been estranged for many years.
Colin had known nothing about Steven having a child and he had never met Sharon. He didn’t know why Courtney’s mother had kept details of his old address in Hamblehurst, as he’d moved out of that house a long time ago. Colin speculated that perhaps Steven gave her the address for some reason when they’d first got together, but that when Steven’s true nature revealed itself, she’d made the decision not to delve any further into the Austin family by making contact or informing them of the baby she was expecting.
If that was the reason why Sharon had never contacted Steven’s family, even after finding out she was pregnant, then Courtney supposed she could understand it. After all, Oliver Redman had turned her back on her, despite her pregnancy, and she was in no rush to get in touch with his family in order to introduce herself and tell them about the child she was carrying. The very idea of it was mortifying.
Courtney wondered why her mother had kept hold of Steven’s brother’s contact details for so long if she never planned on getting in touch with him. Her best guess was that her mother had probably forgotten the information was scribbled on that scrap of paper and stuffed in amongst all the other ancient paperwork she’d clearly forgotten about over the years.
She’d never know for sure. What she did know was that her mother would have liked Colin Austin. A caring and generous man, Courtney understood instinctively that he was nothing like his brother. The more she got to know Colin—her Uncle Colin—the more she wondered at the family relationships that might have been built had Sharon reached out to him all those years ago, either after finding out she was pregnant or after discovering the news about Steven’s death.
After only a few conversations and meet-ups with Colin, Courtney understood how much it might affect his world—and his family’s world—to reveal the niece he never knew he had. Putting herself in the position of Colin’s wife and daughters, who Colin had told her about and who he obviously adored, Courtney knew it was only right to make sure they were, in fact, related before things went any further.
Sharon had never named Steven Austin on Courtney’s birth certificate. While Colin confirmed that Steven was his brother, Courtney wanted more proof of her relationship to Colin before meeting his family. It only made sense that everyone knew where they stood.
A familial DNA test proved what they both already knew—they were blood relations. With that evidence in hand, Courtney felt better about the prospect of being introduced to her uncle’s wife and daughters. Already struggling with the news that he’d had a niece all this time and had known nothing about her, Colin wanted to make sure he handled things properly when he told his family about everything they’d discovered.
Courtney understood his hesitation and was happy to wait until he felt the time was right. It was a lot to take in. An obviously loving and caring family man, she realised how much Colin was struggling with the concept of his brother having a child neither Steven nor Colin had ever known about.
When he’d talked about Steven and the life he’d led, it was clear that his criminality and drug abuse had taken a dreadful toll on the Austin family. No matter how much Colin and his parents tried to help Steven mend his ways and find a way into a better life, he’d always fallen back into his old habits. That had brought heartbreak and a sense of failure, and Colin confessed that those feelings never really went away, not entirely.
Bringing Courtney into his family would also conjure ghosts from the past and prompt questions that might not be easy to answer. And yet even as he waited for the right moment to tell his wife and daughters about Courtney, he was clearly also struck by the dire predicament into which his new niece had fallen.
When she’d told him about her mother’s recent death, Colin was obviously moved. When he asked why she was moving house so soon after suffering a sudden and traumatic bereavement, and while she was pregnant, too, Courtney had confided in him about her eviction and the new bedsit where she was living temporarily. She’d been reluctant to share this information with him, not wanting to sound like the poverty-stricken long-lost relative who’d come crawling out of the woodwork in search of a handout, but the truth had emerged anyway during their conversations.
Colin had been dismayed when he’d seen the bedsit accommodation where she was living, going there under his own steam to drive past the building and get a look at the place. When they next spoke, he’d told her what he thought of the accommodation, the look on his face one of anguish and alarm, and Courtney had to bite her tongue to keep herself from telling him that it was a lot worse inside than outside.
Her living situation wasn’t Colin Austin’s problem to solve. She assured him that once the local council housing officer found somewhere more suitable, she’d move out. The bedsit was just a temporary solution and her time there would soon be behind her.
In the meantime, she was grateful and happy to have found a distant family member and begun the process of building a relationship with her uncle. After the trauma and grief of recent months, it felt good to have someone in her life who she could talk to, and it felt good, too, to connect with a family member she’d never suspected even existed. There was a lot they didn’t know about each other, but she already felt a special bond forming between them, and she was excited about where their uncle-niece relationship might go in the future.
Perhaps, she thought, things were finally looking up in her life?
That’s where things had stood until yesterday morning—Friday—when Courtney woke up at the bedsit to the sounds of someone hammering on her door and then breaking into her room.
Watching in horrified disbelief as the dishevelled, wild-haired man came crashing inside and started grabbing her belongings, and then grabbing at her while she lay in bed, counted as the most terrifying thing that had ever happened to her.
The man, a fellow resident with serious mental health issues, had to be dragged away by another man who lived in the next room. Courtney shuddered to think what might have happened but for his quick thinking. Whether the deranged intruder was trying to rob her, or commit a more heinous act, wasn’t immediately clear.
Courtney wasn’t sure she wanted to know either way.
Fear for her unborn child following the shock and panic of being attacked by a madman left her shuddering. The apologetic manager of the accommodation facility gave her refuge in his office and brought her sugary hot tea to settle her nerves. The manager promised the damaged door to her bedsit room would be mended straight away, and he also wanted to send Courtney to hospital for a check-up, given her pregnant condition.
But after some time spent calming herself down in his office, the last thing she wanted to do was sit in A&E for hours waiting to see a doctor. She sensed no problem with her pregnancy following the fright she’d had. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t badly shaken up.
Once she had her wits about her again, she realised the only thing she wanted to do was speak to her Uncle Colin, who she knew would offer the kind words of comfort she desperately needed to hear.
As she dialled his number, she lamented the disastrous start to her day. After working non-stop since her mother’s funeral, she’d finally agreed to her manager’s request that she take some holiday time. Although Courtney had taken some annual leave when her mother died, she still had plenty of days left over and no guarantee she’d be able to take it all in a single block before starting maternity leave. The small company she worked for could only be so flexible when it came to juggling employee needs and scheduling holidays.
So, she’d taken Friday as an annual leave day and had planned to use it to do some shopping for essential baby things. Excited though she’d been by that prospect, her enthusiasm for the plan evaporated in the wake of the morning’s upset. She was still too shaken up to enjoy the shopping trip she’d hoped for.
A brief phone conversation with her Uncle Colin helped soothe her shattered nerves, and when she told him what had happened at the bedsit, he was appalled. Because she felt so comfortable and at ease in his company, she asked if he might have some time spare to meet her for a coffee. Without her mother around to wrap her in a warm embrace, she wanted to turn to the next best thing—the uncle who was quickly coming to mean the world to her.
The moment she suggested meeting for coffee, Colin agreed, telling her he’d drive over to Southampton as soon as he could. Not wanting to put her uncle to any inconvenience, and eager to get away from Southampton for a few hours anyway, Courtney insisted she’d catch the bus and meet him in Hamblehurst. She hadn’t yet visited the little town where he lived and it would be nice to travel there… and away from her endless troubles.
And so began the chain of events that led to her unexpectedly meeting Colin Austin’s family. Unknown to Courtney, Friday was his birthday—his sixtieth birthday, no less—and she hadn’t realised she was dragging him away from the surprise party his wife and daughters had organised.
Baffled by his disappearance from the party, Colin’s wife, Lorraine, and his daughter, Rosie, covertly followed him to the Hamblehurst café where he arranged to meet Courtney, which was where the two women found her unpacking her endless troubles and the events of that morning while Colin comforted her.
The whole story about who she was and how she’d arrived in Colin’s life had come out as the four of them sat in the café. It wasn’t how either Courtney or Colin hoped the introductions would take place, but their hands had been forced. When Courtney learned of the surprise party she’d interrupted and the birthday celebrations she’d upended, she was mortified and furious with herself, not only for ruining her lovely uncle’s special day but also for not keeping the morning’s dramas to herself in the first place.
Yet, despite the upheaval she’d caused, Lorraine Austin and her daughter, Rosie, insisted that Courtney return with them to the party that was still happening back at Rosie’s house on Foxglove Street. Her protests that she didn’t want to intrude fell on deaf ears.
Which was how she found herself on Foxglove Street, in the home of her new cousin, Rosie, and joining in with the family celebrations.
Which was what led to Rosie insisting she spend the weekend with her, rather than return to the Southampton bedsit where she didn’t feel safe.
Courtney had accepted the invitation gratefully, almost tearfully, amazed at her cousin’s generosity and excited at the prospect of spending time with this new family she was lucky enough to have found, just when she needed them most.
And now, because of that whirlwind of unexpected events that followed one after the other, Courtney was lying in bed late on Saturday night in her cousin’s pretty guest room, thinking back on all that had happened over the last few months.
She’d become pregnant and been dumped by her baby’s father.
Her mother had died suddenly, breaking her heart.
She’d been evicted from the only home she’d ever known and forced to live in a grim bedsit where she’d been terrified out of her wits by an unstable resident.
The savings she’d scraped together to prepare for her baby’s arrival had instead been used to pay for her mother’s funeral and to cover the storage fees for all her worldly belongings while she waited to find somewhere else to live.
Her life felt like it was spinning endlessly out of control. No sooner had she got her head around one traumatic upheaval than another arrived to knock her back off her feet once more. She wondered when the drama would come to a halt, and when she would finally get the much needed breathing space she needed in order to get ready for her beautiful baby arriving.
This wasn’t what she thought her life would be like.
Less than a year ago, everything had seemed so much simpler and easier. She’d had her mother, her home, a decent job, and plans to earn college qualifications at some point in the future. Money was tight, but that was nothing new. There wasn’t much in the way of romance in her life, but she’d hoped that might one day change.
Courtney wondered what she’d give to turn back time and tell herself to appreciate everything she had in life because it would soon change in the blink of an eye.
Still, the unexpected events of Friday, which led to her meeting the rest of her Uncle Colin’s family, had given her these few brief days to catch her breath amid the mayhem of her life. She was grateful for the chance to catch up on much needed sleep, even if her endless napping had led her to now being wide awake late at night while her mind raced.
Perhaps this strange three-day escape from her life, and her escape to her cousin’s house on Foxglove Street, heralded the start of better times ahead? The time she’d spent here since Friday counted as the best she’d had in a very long time. Meeting her new family, enjoying her uncle’s birthday party, feeling welcome and cared for—all these things worked on her tired mind and aching heart like a healing tonic.
Courtney only hoped this sweet and lovely weekend finally marked the turning point she longed for.
Tomorrow, her Uncle Colin and Aunt Lorraine would return from their weekend hotel getaway and they’d promised to spend time with her before she returned to Southampton. She was due back at work on Monday morning, and after the terrifying incident at the bedsit, Courtney wanted to use her lunch break to phone her housing officer and find out how much longer she’d have to wait for somewhere safe to live.
Before her thoughts could race away once more with all the many things she needed to sort out in her life, Courtney closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath. As she reined in her mind and slowed her breathing, her baby kicked inside her.
The sensation was soft and sweet, a gentle nudge more than a kick. Courtney laid her hands across her stomach as her tiny child moved. Comforted by thoughts of her baby, she began to drift and was grateful when sleep came at last.