Chapter 75
75
Evie
There’s some sort of surreal family reunion going on in my parents’ kitchen. Harriet is holding court, sitting on Drew’s knee, with Chloe beside them. “Grandpa” has produced a box of crayons and some stickers. “Nanna” is “just whipping up a batch of mini-pancakes.” It becomes painfully obvious to me, the second I see my parents cosseting Harriet, that this is not their first rodeo. And when I walk in with Bree, Chloe gets out of her chair for me. Chloe, who somehow had a baby with my husband, and yet we’re all smiles?
“Look, Evie!” Harriet says, passing me the drawing she’s done of stick-figure people. “That’s me, Mummy, Daddy, you, and Uncle Drew.”
The stick figure of “Daddy” is crossed out, with angel wings on his back, a sad face and the word dead written beside his name. Dead. Harriet is holding my hand in the drawing, and trying to hold his, but their arms won’t reach.
My God.
Here is Oliver’s grieving little girl, proudly showing me her work, appealing to the love she’s so deeply portrayed between us on this page, and I have no recollection of a single second of our time together. Nothing that I’ve seen nor heard since the day I found out I was a widow has hit me this hard. I’ve been so obsessed trying to work out who I am and what carnage I seem to have caused that I’ve completely underestimated the way my husband’s death has ricocheted through other people’s lives.
Suddenly, I have to remember. Looking into her big, innocent, heartbroken eyes, I know I have to step up. The dormant adult within me needs to phoenix herself out of the ashes of amnesia and stepparent the hell out of this encounter.
“This is beautiful,” I tell her, crouching to her level and then sitting on the kitchen floor beside her, cross-legged. She instantly scrambles into my lap, the way I suspect she has done a hundred times before, and pulls my arms around her waist. When I say her drawing is beautiful, I really mean everything in this room. The warmth I’m feeling in a tableau that should surely be filled with angst. Wouldn’t I have been furious that my husband had this baby? Yet nothing about the celebratory reunion here feels forced or tense or wrong.
“Harriet, you are magical,” I whisper. “Do you know that?”
She reaches back and touches my face with sticky mandarin-scented hands as I kiss the crown of her head, inhaling the scent of blueberry shampoo and sunscreen while love rushes into my drought-ridden psyche, flooding the parched spaces of my heart and pumping life back into my world.
You are the linchpin, I think.
“Daddy died,” she says, completely matter-of-factly. “I typed him a message on my iPad saying, Sorry you died, Dad .”
My heart!
“But he didn’t answer. It means we will never see him again. Evie, are you sad?”
As she asks the question, she jumps up out of my lap again and stands in front of me, taking my face in both her hands and looking directly into my eyes. Silence descends in the room during this inquisition, and I can almost read their minds. Handle this like a seasoned stepmum, Evie. Don’t botch this child’s grief.
“It’s very sad that Daddy died,” I begin. “It feels scary.”
She nods. “I’m scared too.”
I pull her into my arms. “Close your eyes,” I say. “Can you smell those pancakes on the stove?”
“Yes?”
“Can you hear Grandpa’s noisy breathing?”
She giggles, then nods.
“What about Mummy?” I ask. “Did you just hear her footsteps across the kitchen?”
“Yes,” she whispers.
“And I know you can feel my arms around you, can’t you?”
She hugs me hard. “And Uncle Drew saved my life,” she adds. “But I don’t know the other lady.”
She means Bree, but I’ve lost track of this exercise now, my eyes open again, staring at Drew from the kitchen floor. He saved her life? He’s sitting quietly at the table with tears in his eyes, looking at Harriet. He will not look at me.
Goose bumps spread along my arms. The bondedness in this group that I found so hard to understand just moments ago begins to make sense. I’d assumed we’d been through a lot, but this is more than I ever imagined.
“Uncle Drew saved your life,” I repeat, even though I am a completely unreliable narrator. “You’ve got so much love around you, Harriet, even in this little kitchen, haven’t you?”
“Mmm.” She nods again, playing with my hair.
“And do you know what else?” I tell her. She looks up. “We can’t bring Daddy back to you. I wish we could. But these are the very same people who help me when I’m sad and scared and don’t know what to do.”
“But you’re a grown-up!” She is amazed.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m still a teenager,” I confess. And now it’s me with tears in my eyes, and Harriet’s hug is giving comfort this time, not seeking it.
“That’s okay, Evie,” she says. “I’ll look after you.”
“Have we had more than our share of life drama?” I ask Drew, when we steal some time away for an evening walk.
“Everyone has drama. But hearing your story played back in fast-forward isn’t helping.”
He’s right. All the big events that punctuate our lives are usually spread out. Not delivered over forty-eight hours, one huge twist after the other.
“Were you going to tell me I was a stepmother?” I ask. Stepmother. I can’t even contemplate what that means, or how strange it is to know I’ve had a child in my life. The same child who I heard squealing down the phone when Drew promised to take her to the zoo. The one in the situation he described as “complicated” when I hounded him about it. His niece. My stepdaughter. Someone who very clearly loves us both.
“I thought you had enough on your plate. I didn’t think Chloe was going to turn up here, but Harriet was already bereft without her dad and she thought you’d died too. I think Chloe was only going to let her glimpse you. Nobody expected that performance in the kitchen.”
“Performance?”
“You were pretty impressive back there.”
I smile. Actually, it felt fairly instinctive, which is weird because I’ve never even babysat a child that I remember.
We find a bench seat in a park not far from my parents’ house and sit down.
“When Chloe kept calling you, I thought …”
He raises an eyebrow.
“You were being so mysterious and secretive. I thought she was your girlfriend, or that Harriet was yours. You were so gorgeous on the phone with her …” Gorgeous in general. “I thought there was a relationship situation you were keeping from me.”
“There’s no situation,” Drew explains. “Not with me.”
“But there clearly was with my husband?”
Drew shakes his head. “From what I know, it was a one-night thing the night you and Oliver had a massive argument after your graduation. You’d broken up. He was irate. She was there. It was never meant to be anything more than that.”
“So we were together seven years, had one fight, and he accidentally conceived a child?”
Drew frowns and shifts awkwardly on the seat. “It wasn’t your first fight, Evie.”
“Yeah, but I wouldn’t have run straight into the arms of another man, would I?!”
He seems unwilling to answer the question. “Anyway, several years later Chloe turned up begging for Oliver’s help with Harriet.”
“He bloody well should have helped her! Raising a child on her own, and he had all that money.”
He rubs his forehead. “Harriet was sick. Chloe was searching for a familial donor. That’s the only reason she showed up on your doorstep.”
My doorstep. “Was I there?”
“Apparently it was your shining moment. You were very compassionate and forgiving.” He looks at me kindly as he says this. An implied Well done, Evie. That must have been hard.
No wonder she’s so normal around me, and lovely.
“Much like I hope you’re about to be with me for keeping all of this from you,” Drew adds.
I can’t help it. I sort of swell with pride at the idea that I would have set aside what must have felt like a betrayal and handled a situation like this with maturity.
“Oliver wasn’t a match. So that’s when my father broke the news that there was another son.”
Oh!
“Things only deteriorated after that. The chances of an uncle, particularly one who’s a half sibling of the father, being a genetic match were incredibly low.”
I let out a long sigh. I know Harriet is still alive, of course, so there must have been a happy ending to this story. I glance at him nervously. “She’s okay now?”
“She’s wonderful,” Drew says proudly.
“And how did Oliver take it all—you being the donor?”
He winces. “Badly.”
I’m not sure how many more ways my husband can disappoint me but jealousy, when the brother who had nothing gave you everything you needed, tells me all I need to know.
“Evie, the thing is, you let your parents fall madly in love with that little girl. Harriet used to rave about your mum and dad. You saw it today, the way they are with her.”
It was everything I had as a little girl myself. Knowing I’d been able to take the higher ground over how she came into the world, and then seeing my family embrace her—it’s everything that makes me proud of us. It’s all so beautiful.
Drew’s still talking, though. “But then you snatched her away from us all.”