Chapter 47
FREYA
“It’s all a bit odd, don’t you think?”
There she goes. My mother doing what my mother does best. Launching a missile and watching it fly. I don’t want to give her the satisfaction of asking what that’s supposed to mean. But the sentiment had already crawled under my skin, the itch keeping me awake last night.
“What is?” I ask.
“Well, do we really think it’s all a coincidence?” She leaves it there, undetonated, ready to explode. Her forte.
I force a laugh. “What are you trying to say? That someone’s out to get me?”
The words resound in my head; the thought that what’s happening might be personal traps my breath, making my chest feel as if it’s clamped in a vice.
My mother shrugs her shoulders. “Well, look at you. You’ve had one near miss after another. It seems to me that somebody is definitely trying to tell you something, though you’re lucky that whoever it is isn’t very good at finishing the job. Because if it was me, you’d be dead by now.”
I slam my hands down on the kitchen counter. “What is wrong with you?”
She looks taken aback, surprised that I feel the need to ask.
“I’m your daughter—the only one you’ve got—and you’re standing there, telling me that someone’s out to get me and if it was down to you, I’d be dead by now.” I will myself to calm down, but everything she’s ever done and said comes at me in a torrent of sound bites.
I look at her, trying to understand what had happened to make her so apathetic. Had she always been like it? Or was her cold detachment to me brought on by what happened between her and my father?
There was a blissful moment in time, a few years into my adolescence, when I had felt like the most important person in my mother’s life.
Dad had gone, and other men were yet to arrive, so it was just the two of us.
But then she bought a puppy, and it demanded more attention than any man ever could.
It was supposed to be my dog, but it only ever obeyed my mother and preferred to sleep in her bed over anywhere else.
She lavished more attention on him than she ever had on me, but her allegiance was called into question when she saw the bite he’d taken out of my arm.
The nurse said the injury was more akin to a jagged knife edge than a dog’s jaw. “He must have some serious teeth on him,” she said, as she set about stitching me up.
“He barely has any teeth at all,” my mother replied, making me feel foolish for making a fuss.
In the days that followed, she’d been unsurprisingly adamant that I must have done something to rile the normally docile and placid mutt. Because why else would it have gone for me? But I refused to accept any responsibility and vowed not to go back home until she’d gotten rid of it.
She cried for weeks afterward, so she must have felt something at some point. Though looking at the disdain playing on her lips now, it’s long gone.
“What kind of a mother would say something like that?” I shout at her.
She rolls her eyes, as if I’m overreacting. A dangerous game to play. “All I mean by it is that if this is some kind of personal vendetta, then whoever it is seems to be playing with you—otherwise you wouldn’t be standing here now.”
“Is that supposed to be of comfort?” I seethe. “Is that your maternal instinct kicking in?” I laugh acerbically. “It’s taken all these years—and that’s how it finally presents itself. Wishing me dead…”
“Oh, if I had my way—” she starts.
“Go on?” I urge, intrigued to hear what vitriol she’s going to spew next.
She bites down on her lip, to stop herself from saying what she really wants to say.
“You think I deserve something bad to happen, don’t you?”
“You reap what you sow” is all she says.
I blow out my cheeks. “Wow … so twenty years on, you’re still blaming me for my father’s failings?”
She purses her lips together.
“Would you rather I hadn’t told you what he was doing? Pretended that I hadn’t seen what I’d seen?”
“I wish you’d told me the truth,” she says, fixing me with an impenetrable stare.
“I did!” I bark. “And if I hadn’t, you’d still be there—living in blissful ignorance.”
She smiles to herself and it unnerves me. “He says hello, by the way.”
“Who?” I ask, without thinking, or perhaps I know exactly who she’s talking about and my subconsciousness is protecting me.
“Your father,” she says, as casually as if I’d seen him last week.
But I haven’t seen him in almost fifteen years, and even then, it wasn’t to talk to.
He’d been walking down Shoreditch High Street and I’d smiled and waved, tentatively preparing to cross the road to speak to him.
But he’d purposefully turned his head the other way, clearly not able to forgive the part I played in the breakdown of his marriage.
The rejection had stung. I’d thought that with the passing of time, the memories of the great times we’d once shared would outweigh the mess that had been left behind.
He was the best friend I’d ever had, and by seventeen, I’d grown up enough to realize that my life was all the poorer without him in it. But he clearly didn’t feel the same.
If he’d given me the chance, I would have told him that I wish I could turn the clock back. That I’d not meant for him to leave, and if I’d known he would, I would have kept my mouth shut.
“You’ve seen him?” I exclaim. “Where? When?”
“We went out for dinner last week.”
It’s as if a bomb has gone off in my head, exploding into a million pieces, each of which embed themselves into the very core of me.
“You … you went out for dinner … with Dad?” I can barely form the sentence, the thought of them two together, after all this time, feeling like the ultimate betrayal. “How? How is that even possible?”
She shrugs her shoulders. “I bumped into him a few months ago,” she says, watching me carefully. “And we’ve been seeing each other ever since.”
No. No. No. This can’t be happening.
“So has he got something to do with all this?” I rasp, clutching at straws. “Is he looking to settle a score? Is that what you’re trying to say?”
My mother laughs. “Oh, Freya, there are plenty more people with good cause, so he’d be joining a very long queue.”