Chapter Twenty-three
‘I kept waiting and waiting to see if you had any clue. Mum’s always said you didn’t know about me.’
‘Your mum?’ Flynn said, thinking he must have misheard what Molly had said, because what she’d said was impossible.
‘I er – don’t—’ Oh, God. ‘I – do.’
Flashes of waves lapping a moonlit shore came back to him.
Of a dark-haired, very pretty girl he’d met on a visit to see his grandparents in Whitehaven.
He and some friends had gone camping for the night at a tiny Lakeland site and ended up drinking round the fire with some other young campers.
He’d also ended up with one of the girls.
Her name was Imogen – or Immy, as she’d introduced herself.
She’d worn an ankle bracelet and she had a Northern accent and a laugh as warm as the sun.
After they’d virtually ripped off each other’s clothes and had sex down by the lake, they’d sat together drinking cider, Immy wearing his sweatshirt to ward off the evening chill – until her friends came for her.
She walked away, laughing and refusing his pleas for her number.
‘Don’t spoil it, Flynn … Let it be perfect like this for ever. You know it can’t go anywhere. We live too far apart and I have plans.’
She had plans. And he’d have bet his right arm they didn’t include having his child.
‘It’s coming back to you, isn’t it?’ Molly asked, staring at him with the same disapproval that his own mother had always shown when he’d come home late after being out on his bike.
‘You and my mum hooked up on the last night of the holiday. She said you’d drunk loads of cider and had sex by the lake. That’s when I was conceived.’
‘Oh God.’
She’d pushed the buggy to the side of the Ice House where it was a little quieter, but Flynn was still conscious of the world rushing by while he was trapped in a surreal bubble.
‘Mum was on the pill but she’d had a stomach upset and you were both too drunk to use a condom.
You told her that, even though you were Cornish, you hated surfing, had just passed your motorbike test and one day you’d have a Harley Davidson.
’ Molly paused before adding in a quiet voice. ‘And that she had beautiful eyes …’
Flynn was too stunned by the details to reply, both the intimate ones and the specifics of what he and Immy had spoken about on that evening.
It all sounded so reckless now, though, at the time, it had felt spontaneous and special.
His throat felt very dry, his voice strangled when he finally recovered himself.
‘I am – s-sorry.’
Molly looked hurt. ‘Sorry I’m here?’
‘No!’ he burst out in horror. ‘No, I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry I never knew. Sorry that you had to find me and your mother never tried to find me. Are you – are you 100 per cent sure, though? That I’m your father?’
‘I’m sure,’ Molly said fiercely, ‘but I guess it’s a shock.
We can do a DNA test if you like, but I know what it’ll say.
’ She sounded so confident and she knew so much detail about that night that only her mother could have told her.
‘Mum said she didn’t even have your number so she couldn’t find you.
She knew your first name and what you looked like but, back then, you weren’t online.
It was only ten years later that she finally found out you’d joined Facebook. ’
‘I don’t do social media …’ Flynn said, having always had a horror of sharing his boring existence and innermost secrets with the ether. ‘I didn’t want to join then, but everyone had and was using it to arrange meeting up. I felt I ought to.’
‘You regret it now, I bet.’ Molly laughed. ‘Because Mum did find you.’
‘B-but why didn’t she get in touch with me?’
‘I was ten by then and she didn’t want you getting involved. She’d managed on her own and met someone else. Her life had moved on. We all moved on without you.’
‘How did you find me now?’ he managed, hearing himself dismissed as an irrelevance – someone who might as well not have existed – in his own child’s life.
‘I’ve known your name for a while. When I was fourteen, Mum decided to tell me all about you.
It was only when I had Esme that I knew how much I wanted to find you myself.
Esme changed the way I saw myself – and my place in the world, I suppose.
I realised what being a parent means when she came along.
Her dad isn’t much of a part of her life and so I appreciated what my mum went through to bring me up – on her own until I was four and she met my stepdad.
I wanted to know who my birth father was. ’
From the buggy, Esme let out a wail. Or it could have been a gurgle of excitement or hunger or cold – Flynn had no clue what his granddaughter – his granddaughter – wanted or needed. All this time … He’d had no clue his daughter existed.
It made him feel almost dizzy. He thrust his fingers through his hair. ‘I swear I had no idea …’
‘I can tell that,’ Molly said. ‘It’s a shock and I wish I’d told you another time, not at your work, but I’ve been holding on for so long now that it just burst out.’
‘What made decide to you tell me – now?’
‘Maybe I still wouldn’t have searched for you, but I overheard two of the castle workers in the café talking about the new man that had started. They said your name: Flynn Cafferty, and that you used to live in Cornwall – in Newquay.’
‘How the—’ Flynn bit back the expletive, some inner filter reminding him that his child and granddaughter were present.
‘I almost dropped a tray. I knew straight away it was you. I didn’t know what to do after that.’
‘Does your Nan know who I am?’ Flynn asked.
‘She knows your name but she didn’t connect it with you. When she was going on about you being handsome, I thought she might guess, but she’s only seen one photo of you from years back. You had short hair and were wearing a baseball cap and you looked younger.’
‘I’ve aged a lot recently,’ Flynn muttered – and most of it in the past five minutes.
‘You don’t go online much,’ Molly said. ‘Not for a bloke your age. Most are forever sharing photos of themselves on holidays or in the gym trying to look cool.’
‘I’m sorry to disappoint you. Still, you did well to track me down.’
‘I also saw that you updated your LinkedIn,’ she said proudly.
‘My LinkedIn?’
‘You sound very impressive.’
‘I promise you I don’t mean to.’
Esme shrieked in delight – or derision. Was she old enough to be sarcastic? Of course not, but Flynn didn’t actually know how old she was. Seven months? A year? It was a complete guess.
Molly smiled and placed Esme’s toy penguin within her reach again. ‘So that’s why Nan had no idea that she was talking to my father, and …’ Molly grimaced. ‘Saying you were handsome. Sorry about that. I love her to bits but she can be very embarrassing.’
Flynn made an unintelligible noise. He couldn’t form a coherent response in the face of this one huge revelation.
It was like a giant sun, irradiating every other thought.
He had a daughter, and a granddaughter. He was a father and his child and her child were here in front of him and apparently living down the road.
‘I – I am – sorry … I – um – do you want to get a coffee?’ he asked, wondering what excuse he could make to leave the Winter Spectacular and where could they go to speak privately.
‘I don’t think that’s a great idea. Esme needs her bedtime milk and, anyway, do you really want to talk about this in public?
’ she added, reminding him that they were standing in the middle of hundreds of people, his work colleagues a moment away.
It was a miracle no one had called him on the radio yet to ask where he’d been.
‘No. Yes. I mean you’re right,’ Flynn said, realising Molly was more mature than he had given her credit for.
‘I could meet you tomorrow, though?’
‘Yeah. That would be good.’ Good? Was it? ‘I can get some time off,’ he said, vowing that he’d make time.
‘Should I come here? I don’t want Nan to know I’ve found you yet. She might have a heart attack.’
She’s not the only one, thought Flynn, his body stiff with tension. ‘Yes, if you don’t mind. You could come to the cottage. I can meet you in the visitor car park. We can talk at my place.’
‘OK.’ She beamed.
Esme let out another wail and, this time, even Flynn could tell it was a cry of demand.
‘OK, sweetheart. I know. It’s almost bedtime.’ She looked at Flynn with an eye roll. ‘She probably needs a clean nappy too. I’d better get home fast. I don’t want to change her in the public toilets here. Too busy.’
‘You could use my cottage …’ he offered, before he’d really known what he was saying. But Esme was his flesh and blood.
‘Thanks. But I’ll get her home. I can see your place tomorrow—’ she hesitated and, for a second, he thought she might call him Dad, but instead she grasped the buggy handles and said, ‘See you tomorrow. What time?’
‘Six-thirty?’ He dragged up a smile from somewhere because he thought it was how he ought to react. ‘I’ll look forward to it.’
The words came out of his mouth but they hadn’t seemed to come from his brain. They had just emerged as a pleasantry he might say to an old friend, to Harvey, or to Lara. Oh God, Lara …
‘Me too, and we can definitely arrange a DNA test if you want to. It might give us all some certainty, even if I am sure,’ said Molly.
‘Yes. Probably a good idea.’
She lifted Esme’s hand in a wave.
‘Bye,’ said Flynn, and lifted his own hand and somehow managed a smile for the baby and his daughter.
Molly wheeled the buggy away between the flanking yew trees and he watched until she turned a corner and vanished.
He was alone again, and his first thought was that he had woken from a very vivid dream.
It wasn’t a nightmare, and it wasn’t a joyful dream that he wanted to step back into.
It was a strange out-of-body experience.
Had he been hallucinating? Was he drunk?
Was there another layer of consciousness that he needed to pierce through?
He looked up at the spiky branches, sparkling with a myriad of lights. He could hear shouts and laughter again, and a child screaming ‘I want to see Santa!’, and the cannon boom of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture from the fountains.
He was definitely fully awake. Molly and Esme really had been there. And what she’d said had to be true. She knew so much – the details. The lake, the dates, the cider …
Why would she make it up? And when he’d looked, really looked at Molly, he could surely see himself in her.
Take away the red streaks in her hair and that was his own thick, almost black hair.
And her eyes – a deep brown flecked with amber.
Then there was her height, the confidence, the challenging gaze, and the direct manner … she had to be his daughter.
His daughter.
A rush of emotion surged through him: fear and shock, and joy that brought tears to his eyes. He hadn’t cried for a decade or more and yet here he was, in the middle of a working day, tears on his face.
‘Flynn! There you are. I need you.’
It was Lara’s voice behind him, yet he dared not turn round, so he pulled a tissue from his pocket and covered his face, blowing his nose noisily.
‘Sorry,’ he mumbled, blinking and wrinkling his nose in an almost comic way. ‘The cold got to me. Hope it’s not flu. I can’t afford the time off.’
‘Me neither,’ she replied. ‘Seriously, I hope it isn’t flu.
Not at this particular moment especially.
Everyone’s looking for you. The lights have gone out in the Ice House – sorry, grotto, and we have a queue of kids and parents.
Santa’s resorted to his phone torch but we can’t allow anyone else in because of health and safety. ’
Flynn cursed softly, sighed, then heard his voice speaking calmly, as if disassociated from his body. ‘OK. On my way. I’ll soon have everything sorted, don’t worry.’