Chapter Twenty-Nine
Honor found herself deposited suddenly on to her own two feet.
She closed her eyes. She was falling down a lift shaft. She opened them again. Nope. She was still here, the figure was still there and she had to force suddenly frozen lips to work. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’
Thumbs hooked in the belt loops of his blue jeans, Stef strolled closer. ‘Getting here in the nick of time, seems to me.’ His voice was deceptively lazy.
Martyn didn’t move or speak. Honor felt as if her insides had turned to worms and every single one of them cringed away from how he must feel about being caught in exactly the situation he’d been trying to avoid from the first. She touched his chest. ‘I have to speak to him.’
Slowly, he turned his eyes to her. His expression was unreadable as the last of the light began to leach from the clear summer sky. ‘I suppose so,’ he said, stiffly, as if he actually didn’t think so at all. ‘I’ll wait in the car so I know you’re OK.’ He nodded, shifting his weight, ready to step back.
Stef laughed, stepping out of the shadows so that his face caught the light from a street lamp. He was harder, thinner and looked weary. ‘Why wouldn’t she be? She’s my wife ! Listen, you’re really not needed here. I don’t know what Honor let you think but, believe me, I know her. She’s mad as hell at me, right now, but she’ll cool down and come home. I know her.’ He rocked on and off his heels. ‘Didn’t I know exactly where to find her, right here in liddle ole England? As soon as she left town on her high horse I knew she’d be heading here to meet her long lost mommy. So, what’s she like, Honor? This Robina Gordon?’
And Martyn let go of her hand.
His shock was like a cold breath between them, curling and chilling as fog. ‘Your mother’s Robina ?’ Even through the twilight, Honor could feel his disbelief.
She nodded, miserably. ‘I was going to tell you, tonight.’
Stef laughed again. ‘Oh, pardon me. Was that a secret?’
‘Why hadn’t you told me already?’ The disbelief became anger, sharp as a blade.
‘Because — because she’s—’ Honor was horrified to feel hot tears spilling from her eyes. ‘I was so disappointed. All my life, I’d thought that she’d love me like a proper mom and would have some fantastic, justifiable reason for leaving me when I was a baby.’ The tears tracked down her cheeks and her heart began to beat in huge great thuds. ‘But when I met Ru I began to realise that biology and maternal instinct are not the same. She lets Ru down in so many different ways.
‘And she’s your stalker for goodness’ sakes!’ she finished, shakily. ‘That made it a little awkward.’
‘But you’ve known all the time that you’ve been living in Eastingdean?’
Honor opened her mouth but Stef beat her to it. ‘She’s known a hell of a lot longer than that.’
Martyn turned to him. ‘How?’
Stef shrugged, scuffing closer. ‘Years. It’s the kind of thing you can find out on the internet for fifty dollars. Every so often she’d talk about coming out here to meet her mom and I’d tell her what a bad idea it was, how they probably wouldn’t even like each other.’
Martyn was looking down at Honor as if he wasn’t liking what he saw. ‘Why didn’t you want me to know?’
She made herself confront the pain in his eyes. It was hard but she wanted him to see she wasn’t trying to hide anything, now. But she couldn’t prevent her voice from emerging tight with tears. ‘To begin with, I didn’t want anyone to know, in case it got back to her before I figured out what I wanted her to know. My dad warned me off ever searching her out. He said that I would be hurt, that Robina was nobody’s happy ending. He called her a flake. When I traced her and her son, Rufus, everyone was against me coming here and making her real. So I didn’t.
‘Then . . . I lost my job,’ she glanced at Stef, ‘and I had my severance money and I thought I’d come and do it anyway.’
‘It was a “fuck you”,’ stuck in Stef.
‘No, it wasn’t! It was for me ,’ she fired back. ‘I just pleased myself for once, OK?’ Shakily, she turned back to Martyn, forcing the tears back, wanting and not wanting to crumble, to fling herself into his arms. Good guys tended to console crying women. But if Martyn hadn’t read that memo and pushed her away . . .
With superhuman effort, she swallowed the sobs down. ‘It seemed possible and reasonable to come here and just get a look at Robina. At my mother.’ She had to swallow again. ‘To maybe get to know her and judge for myself. After all, the Robina my dad knew was no more than a kid. It was thirty years ago that she left me and I knew that she could have found me, but what if she hadn’t just because of all the same doubts I had? What if, when we met, we had gotten along?’ Her voice was wavering but she held her gaze steady. ‘So I came. I took a look at her. I found a way to get to know her a little. I planned that, afterwards, I would probably just go on home with my curiosity satisfied and pull my life back together and move on.’ She found herself clutching Martyn’s hand, willing him to understand. ‘All these years, all my attention had been focused on her and I didn’t think properly about Ru. He was the one with the real mom, right? He was the lucky one.
‘Turns out I was wrong about that. Turns out he could really use a hand from his big sister. And I felt something for him that I really didn’t feel for his mother. Our mother. It complicated things! Should I tell him? Should I tell her? Could I tell one without the other? It seemed safer to tell no one, at least for a while. And ,’ she went on because she couldn’t let him speak before she confessed the whole mess, ‘she knows about me and you. And she fired me. Which was unexpectedly painful.’
Slowly, he nodded. Computing but not commenting. Probably he saw his stalker getting a dose of reality as unimportant right now. Or he just thought that Honor had been served right. His eyes were unreadable. ‘Now I see why you didn’t want me to call you Freedom.’
Stef looked at him sharply. ‘My, you have gotten intimate, haven’t you? That’s something she doesn’t tell everyone.’
‘It seems as if there’s a lot she doesn’t tell everyone.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I was going to tell you about Robina.’
He sighed. ‘Maybe you were.’
‘I tried to talk to you about her just before you left and you said—’
‘I remember what I said. A nice easy out for you, wasn’t it?’