Chapter Twenty-Two
Twenty-two
It was the first of December and the café on the corner was fully Christmas ready. The long bar that ran the length of the window was decorated with a poinsettia garland, the red petals pressed against the glass soaking up the condensation as it rolled down the window. The counter area was hung with brightly colored pompom swags and the tree was a jazzy mix of glitter coffee cups and cake slice decorations.
James sat at a scrubbed pine table in the corner looking conspicuous in his expensive suit. He oozed discomfort, and Harriet would have felt sorry for him if she weren’t still raw.
Her heart was beating fast, and her stomach churned with a mixture of apprehension and hurt. She knew that things were about to change and she wasn’t confident about which way the pendulum would swing. James looked up and met her eyes, and she saw him swallow before he closed the book he’d been reading and stood up. It was a pity, she thought, that his old-fashioned manners didn’t stretch to telling the truth. He pulled out her chair and she sat but didn’t say thank you. He sat back down. Crossed his legs and uncrossed them, laid his hands flat on the table and then folded them in his lap. He was uncomfortable. Good.
“I wasn’t sure you’d show up,” he said.
“Neither was I.” Who was she kidding, she was always going to show.
“I ordered you a flat white and a few different pastries. I didn’t know what you’d be in the mood for, and I know you don’t tend to eat breakfast before you leave the house.”
“Thank you, you didn’t have to.”
He shifted in his chair, crossed and uncrossed his legs again. “I suppose I’ll just get on with it, then.”
“That would be best,” she replied in a clipped tone.
Her phone rang; it was Cornell. “I have to take this.”
James nodded.
“Sebastian. What can I do for you?”
“I can’t find Jemima Bryce’s file, where the hell is it?” he snapped down the phone.
“Go to your saved works and double-click on ‘Pending Cases.’ All the files will come up by name.”
She could hear the clack of the keys being finger-punched beneath Cornell’s grumbles.
“And where the hell are you?” he asked. “I thought we agreed that your vanity project wasn’t to interfere with work.”
Harriet gritted her teeth. “It isn’t. I’ll be in shortly. Have you found the file?”
After an ungracious thank-you, Cornell ended the call.
“Sorry,” she said to James. “Please continue.”
He took a deep breath, “I only—”
He was cut off by the perky waitress, who practically danced the orders to the tables, placing a tray with two coffees and a plate piled high with pastries down in front of them.
“Hi!” she addressed Harriet brightly. “Lovely to see you actually sitting in, rather than dashing in and out like the Road Runner being chased by Wile E. Coyote.”
Harriet smiled at her. “I am perpetually cutting it fine.”
“Nothing wrong with that!” the waitress trilled as she unloaded the breakfast things and pranced back to the counter.
The interruption seemed to have thrown James, and he cleared his throat and cleaned his glasses.
“Where was I?” he asked.
“You got as far as ‘I only,’?” Harriet said helpfully.
“Right.” He replaced his glasses and took a breath in. “I only—”
Harriet’s phone rang on the table. Ali. She picked it up without a second thought. Across the table, James’s lips thinned to a flat line.
“Morning, everything all right?”
“Yeah, sorry to bother you,” said Ali. “Frederick Mercer’s mum wants to discuss a plan of action after his ADHD diagnosis, and she’ll only speak to you. Can I book her in for ten forty a.m.? It’s your only gap today.”
Harriet rubbed her forehead, “Um, yeah, of course, that’s fine.” She ended the call and settled back in her chair expectantly.
“Do you ever not answer your phone?” James asked tightly.
“It’s my job.”
“It’s borderline obsessive.”
“We’re not here to discuss my foibles,” she retorted, and was pleased to see him shift in his chair with a chastened expression. He took a sip of his coffee, then cleared his throat, twice.
“I only found out about Lyra, about having a daughter, in January this year,” he began. “I had absolutely no idea that there was even a chance that I might have a child somewhere in the world until she emailed me. She’s been living in Edinburgh all this time.”
Okay, now he had her attention.
“That…” She wasn’t quite sure what to say. “Must have been a surprise.” This put a slightly different spin on things. But she still couldn’t fathom why he wouldn’t have told her.
“You have no idea.” He gave a nervous chuckle and rubbed his hand through his hair. There was a vulnerability in the action that she hadn’t seen before. “Talk about turning life on its head.”
“That’s what kids generally do.”
“Except normally you get a warm-up period—you know, you have nine months to get used to the idea of being a parent and then you grow with them, learn as you go along. You don’t just wake up one day and find you’ve got a twenty-five-year-old daughter.” He raised his eyes to the heavens as though looking for spiritual guidance. Harriet took a big bite of a cinnamon whirl; she needed the sugar.
“FYI,” she said around a mouthful of pastry, “pregnancy and birth don’t prepare you in any way for the all-encompassing hostile takeover of your life that is parenthood. I’m just saying. Knowing everything I know now, having a ready-made adult rock up at my door would be a piece of cake.”
James rubbed his brow. “Not for me.”
“Okay, so I appreciate it’s a big adjustment, but I don’t understand why you were keeping it a secret.”
“I wasn’t.”
Harriet blustered out an indignant huff, sending pastry crumbs across the table. “I beg to differ. I told you about Maisy that first night in the bar. At any point between then and the myriad times I must have talked about her since, you could have mentioned that you had a daughter too. Instead, you’ve turned it into this whole big deal.”
“It’s a big deal to me.” His petulance knocked the rise out of any sympathy she might have been feeling.
She folded her arms and leaned back in her chair. James stirred his coffee and took a sip, then placed his cup back on the saucer, turning it so that the handle was at a perfect right angle to him.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. The longer I left it, the worse it was going to look when I finally did tell you. I’m still getting used to being a parent; it doesn’t feel natural yet to casually proclaim myself a father. I don’t feel worthy of the title, for a start. And I knew I couldn’t tell you that I had a daughter without telling you the whole sorry tale, about how I had been oblivious to her existence and completely absent from her life until eleven months ago.”
“Why not? You could have just said ‘I’ve got a daughter’ and I wouldn’t have known any different.”
He laughed humorlessly. “ Why not? Because since the moment I met you all I’ve wanted to do is tell you everything. Every time you pin me with one of your looks, I have an uncontrollable urge to overshare. I’m trained to play my cards close to my chest, and you make me want to blabber like some gossipy teenager. It’s disconcerting.”
“Oh, so it’s my fault? I see.”
“No, that’s not it. I’m not blaming you. I simply…” He sighed. “Because of the way that I feel about you, I couldn’t tell you part of it without telling you all of it, and if you knew all of it…” He fiddled with the spoon on his saucer. “I was afraid that you would judge me.”
“Why would I judge you?”
“I see the standards you set for yourself, and I didn’t like the idea of not measuring up.”
She wasn’t sure if she ought to be offended by this or not.
“I wouldn’t have thought…I don’t think any less of you because you are learning how to be a father to a daughter you didn’t know you had. If anything, I have more respect for you, not less.”
The compliment seemed to land heavily on him. He looked around the busy café and then took another swig of his coffee, avoiding her gaze.
“I didn’t expect—” He stopped and rubbed his temples. “I didn’t expect all the guilt that would come with being a parent.”
She huffed out a laugh at that.
“That’s another secret about parenthood that nobody ever tells you; it lurks in the same vault in your mind as eternal worry and constant fear. But if it’s any help at all, I always think the feelings of guilt are how you know you’re probably parenting right. It’s the ones who don’t give a rat’s cojones about how their actions will affect their kids that you’ve got to worry about.”
“Are you speaking from experience or trying to make me feel better?”
“Both.”
“I’m sorry that I hurt your feelings; that was the furthest thing from my intentions.”
There was a three-way wrestling match happening inside her brain: forgive him and move forward with whatever this thing was between them, forgive him but step away, or not forgive him and cut her losses. Was she a fool to believe that he was a good guy? She didn’t think so. He’d made an error of judgment and then found himself in too deep. She wasn’t so na?ve as to think that all apologies were genuine, but this one was from his heart, and she knew it because she felt it strike deep into her own.
She slid her hand across the table toward his, stopping just shy of his fingers tapping nervously on the wood. He looked at her, and his amber eyes were fire. Then he dropped his gaze to the table and stretched his hand out toward hers, a mere breath of space between their fingertips now.
“I’ve missed so much of her life.” His voice was a low whisper, a rich, deep note that resonated inside her. “All the milestones. School plays, grazed knees, first steps, first smiles, it’s all happened without me. I’ve lost so much time that I can never get back. How can I ever make up for that? And what about the debt I owe Morgan? Lyra’s mum,” he clarified. “How can I ever make up for not being there to support her while she raised our daughter?”
The anger she’d felt toward him dissolved, and in its place was an ache in her chest for him. When she spoke again, her voice was soft.
“Maybe instead of dwelling on the time you’ve lost, you should put your energies into filling the present with moments that will make future memories.”
He sighed. “I know that you’re right. But I’m finding it hard to let it go. All my adult life I’ve been career oriented, setting goals and seeing how fast I could smash them. I was my only priority because there was only me and that made me selfish in a lot of ways, but it also didn’t matter. I mean, who was I hurting if I was only responsible for my own happiness?”
“That seems like a fair point.”
“But now everything is different because all that time there was someone out there that I should have been being responsible for. And now I look at my life choices and they feel, I don’t know, empty.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re cheapening your achievements; all the things you’ve worked hard for still count. You should be proud of the life you’ve created.” She chose her words carefully for the next question. “Does Lyra hold resentments?”
He shook his head, smiling at the mere mention of her name, and Harriet couldn’t help but want her own name to have that effect on him.
“No, none. At least none that she’s shown me. She is so much more than I deserve.”
“You’re being very hard on yourself.”
“To her credit, her mum always made it clear that I had no knowledge of her existence.”
A remembrance of an elegant woman at the gallery last night, linking her arm through Lyra’s, pushed itself to the front of Harriet’s mind, and instinctively she pulled her hand back.
“Are you and Morgan, I mean…”
He read her meaning at once. “A thing? No.”
“If you could go back…”
He shook his head, understanding the things she wanted to know. “The truth is we were never a thing, not really. Not that it’s any excuse. We just weren’t. We met at university and we, well, I guess we used to ‘hook up,’ as the kids say.”
“Friends with benefits,” Harriet added helpfully.
He screwed his face up. “Even that implies it being more than it was.”
“Booty calls?”
He burst out a laugh and it was like the room flooded with light. She warmed herself in it.
“Really?” he asked incredulously.
His smile was an addiction, and she needed another hit.
“Ooh, wait,” she said, “I’ve got it: Netflix and chill.” She’d learned the meaning of that last year when she’d incorrectly used it to describe her weekend plans to her tutor group.
He leaned across the table and hit her with the full force of his grin, and she wanted to smoosh his cheeks into her cleavage.
“Can you stop denigrating my past, please?”
“You started it, I’m simply trying to categorize.”
“The point is, Morgan and I were never a great love story, and even if I’d known about Lyra, it wouldn’t have changed anything. We’re very different people.”
“Is that why she didn’t tell you? Because she didn’t want either of you to feel obliged to try and make a relationship work?”
He drummed the fingers of both hands on the table, his brow ever so slightly creased. This, she knew, was how he weighed his options and measured his words before he spoke. Knowing his tells gave her a warm sensation.
“There were a few factors at play,” he began. “For a start, I was offered the chance to work my pupillage with a big law firm in New York straight after university, and I’m ashamed to say that I left without a backward glance. Or even a goodbye. By the time Morgan found out she was pregnant, I was long gone. Even if she’d wanted to reach out, she wouldn’t have known where to look.”
“Surely she could have asked around, you must have had some friends in common.”
“It wasn’t quite that simple.” He chewed his lip. “I wasn’t exactly the only candidate, so to speak. Over the years they ruled out some of the others with DNA tests, and by a process of elimination, eventually there was only me left.”
“Just like Mamma Mia! ” Harriet gushed.
“It isn’t. Absolutely nobody sang.”
Things were slotting into place in her mind. “This is why you want to do better. It’s for Lyra and Morgan. You’re atoning for the women you feel you’ve let down in your past.”
He held her gaze and she could read it all in his eyes. “I don’t know if it’s atonement exactly,” he said. “But I had a realization, and I want to do things differently going forward. There are disruptors and instigators of change, and I’m not one of them; I accept my limitations. You, on the other hand, are someone who leads the charge; you want to save everyone! I can’t change the world, but I can change me and be one better man in it. I can move through life in a more thoughtful and respectful way.”
“Changing the world one kind act at a time.” She smiled at him. “That’s why you suggested to Evaline that it would be a good idea to let me use the theater. It wasn’t only about staging it for sale, was it?”
The left side of his mouth quirked upward. “Like I said, I’m not a disruptor, I’m a realist. I wanted to help you, but I wasn’t about to piss off my firm’s biggest client. I work within my limitations.”
“You started a ripple,” she said, smiling at him.
“Because I knew you could turn it into a wave.”
Neither of them spoke for a moment as they looked at each other, the noisy café falling away. His faith in her was a gift, but it was too precious, breakable, easily crushed by her fear of failure. She was a fraud. She wasn’t the instigator he believed her to be; her motives were driven by guilt, just like his. As if on cue, her phone rang.
“I need to take this,” she said.
“You always need to take it.”
She ignored him and went outside, returning five minutes later to find him still sat there, stewing.
“It was a student’s parent. It was work,” she said, though no explanation was required.
“Your commitment to your work is admirable, but surely you can’t be expected to be on call twenty-four-seven.”
“My job can be intense; it doesn’t always keep regular hours.”
“To be honest, it isn’t only your job that’s the issue. You are always available to everyone, always, which in a weird way makes you wholly unavailable to any one person ever. I don’t think we’ve had a single conversation day or night that hasn’t been interrupted by your phone in some way; if it’s not a call, it’s a message or voice note. I realize that given my recent behavior, I’m in no position to make demands, but if we are going to venture forward with this thing between us, I’d like to occasionally come higher on your list of priorities than your phone.”
She sucked in a breath. He was right, of course. She’d once left a church in the middle of a wedding to take a work call.
“I have”—she fumbled for the right words—“phone issues.”
James sat back, hands in his lap, giving her space to continue. Needing something to do with her hands, she took another pastry from the plate and began to carefully unroll it. If she was going to tell him, there would be no better time.
“I didn’t always work in pastoral care. Until eight years ago I taught English literature.”
She swallowed and began to peel apart the flaky layers of the croissant.
“There was a girl in my class, Zoe. One of those exceptionally bright students who just hoovers up information, full of potential.” Her fingers were sticky, but she continued to dismantle the pastry. “She had a troubled home life. Neglect, substance abuse; none of it considered dangerous enough to remove the children, but her family was well known to social services. I knew how hard it was for her to keep up with her studies and not to get sucked into the life that seemed hell-bent on swallowing her up. I did my best to keep an eye on her, but I had sixty students in my cohort: fifty-nine other humans that also needed my attention.”
The croissant lay in shreds on the plate, and she stared at her deconstruction as she forced her words out of a throat that felt as though it wanted to clam shut.
“When she started missing lessons, I alerted the relevant people at the ends of the lists; I even called at her house, multiple times. But I was so busy, I had other students, assignments to mark, and Maisy was still little…”
She arranged the pastry into small, neat mounds on her plate.
“Then one night I had a missed call from her; I’d fallen asleep on the sofa while marking assignments. When I woke up and saw it, I called her back, but it rang out. The next day I discovered she’d been arrested for possession of an illegal weapon and Class A drugs with intent to sell. The phone call had come two hours before her arrest. She’d reached out to me, and I hadn’t been there. I went to see her at the police station. It was clear she’d been doing more than simply running the drugs. The way she looked at me…” Her mind threw up the image that would haunt her forever: black hollows under her eyes, lips cracked and bleeding, matted hair, and an accusing expression that asked, Where were you? Why didn’t you save me?
“What happened to her?” James asked gently.
“She was sent to a juvenile detention center and after that, I don’t know. I don’t think she wants to be found. I’m pretty sure she changed her name, certainly on social media. Her brothers and sisters were taken into care and her parents moved away. That was the end of the line.”
“None of that was your fault. You understand that, don’t you?”
“I let her down. She was vulnerable and I didn’t see her fall because I was too busy . You know people always talk about ‘breaking the cycle’ like it’s easy, like you just have to make the choice to live a different kind of life, but they don’t see the jaws of that life snapping at the heels of the person trying to escape it, waiting for one small slip that will give its teeth the purchase they need to drag them in.”
She picked up a napkin and began wiping her hands roughly, repeatedly, but they still felt sticky. James reached over and placed his hands over hers to still them.
“You did what you could.”
“It wasn’t enough. I wasn’t there.”
“Do you honestly think that if you’d taken that call, things would have been different? From what you’ve said, she was already on a rocky path.”
“I’ll never know, will I?”
“You can’t be forever on some sort of reparations mission. You gave up a career that you loved to make sure something like that doesn’t happen again; nobody can say that you haven’t done enough. I’d like to meet any person who had the audacity to suggest it.”
“How do you know I loved my old career?
“Any idiot can see it. I’ve seen how discussing Dickens with the famous five lights you up from the inside out. I’ve watched the text come alive for them when they see it through your eyes. Your job title may be different, but in your heart you’re still a teacher.”
Her mouth worked a small smile.
He kept hold of her hands.
“Well, now you know. I’m not the ‘disruptor’ that you think I am. I’m like you, just trying to do better,” she said.
“Oh, I don’t know, you’ve managed to completely disrupt my life.” He gave her a crooked smile. “And every day I’m gladder about it.”
“Your charm will be my undoing.”
“Does that mean I’m forgiven?”
“I’ll give a tentative yes.” She smiled at him.
“I’ll take that. I was going out of my mind worrying that I’d blown things with you. I hardly slept last night, just kept going over and over it in my head. The look on your face when you thought I…well, I don’t exactly know what you thought, but it was bad. Your expression damn near broke me. I don’t ever want to be the cause of that expression again.”
“And I will try not to be quite such a hostage to my phone. You’re right, it has become an obsession. It started with my work, but over time it’s bled out into every area of my life. I need to work on that.”
He rubbed his thumb over her knuckles. “I’m sorry I was harsh. I understand now where your need to be available comes from and I appreciate your willingness to try and put your phone aside for us.”
They ate their breakfast together in the noisy café, the pastries that Harriet hadn’t shredded, at least. Something had shifted between them, like a sky left clear and bright after a storm has wrung itself out. Last night she wasn’t sure that there was a way back for them and yet here they were, in a better place than they had begun.