Chapter 27
Chapter Twenty-Seven
brYNN
Dawn light creeps through the curtains. Grey-pink, soft-edged. Everything feels suspended, not quite real. Magical.
Jude’s already awake. I can feel him moving carefully, trying not to disturb me. The mattress dips as he sits up, and I keep my breathing steady, my eyes closed.
Coward. You’re being a coward.
But I’m not ready. Not yet. I need time to think, to untangle the knot that’s been tightening like a noose inside me since I sat bolt upright at three in the morning with his mother’s name ringing in my ears.
I hear him pull on his jeans. The soft thud of his boots. Then he pauses, and I feel the warmth of him leaning over me, his lips brushing my forehead.
‘I’ll be back later,’ he murmurs. ‘Get some sleep.’
I make a vague noise of acknowledgement, and then he’s gone. The cottage door clicks shut behind him, and I listen to his footsteps fade down the path.
He’s going to work. Of course he is. His father threw him out last night – not under my roof – but Jude Harding is still going to show up at the harbour, still going to haul nets and check the boat and do whatever needs doing.
Because that’s who he is. Loyal to the bone, even to people who don’t deserve it.
I have opinions about this.
Lots.
I keep them to myself.
Part of me wants to run after him, grab his arm, tell him to let Reuben stew in his own bitterness for once. Let the old man see what happens when he pushes away the only son who’s actually staying.
But a larger part of me – the part that’s been awake for hours, turning over puzzle pieces in the dark – needs him to go.
I need to be alone with my father’s letters.
I give it twenty minutes. Long enough to be sure he’s not coming back for a forgotten wallet or a last kiss. Then I’m out of bed, pulling on yesterday’s clothes, making tea with hands that won’t quite steady.
The box is where I left it, tucked in the corner of the sitting room. Grandad’s things. Dad’s letters. The paper trail of a broken man’s life.
I carry my tea to the armchair and pull the box onto my lap.
Helen Harding.
My dad and Jude’s mum. An affair. It has to be – nothing else makes sense. The intensity of Reuben’s hatred. The way the whole village went quiet when I asked what happened. Bill’s sad eyes: some wounds run deep.
But even as I think it, my mind rebels.
Does that make us – what? Some kind of incestuous nightmare? My dad shagged his mum, so now we’re … step-siblings by infidelity? Gross. I can’t even deal with the thought of that.
I laugh, but it comes out wrong. High-pitched. Slightly unhinged.
Get a grip, Trelawney.
We’re not related. Not by blood. Our parents having an affair doesn’t make us family – it just makes us the inheritors of someone else’s mess.
Although that’s hardly a comfort, is it?
I set down my tea and start pulling papers from the box.
Methodical this time. No more skimming, no more putting things aside for later.
I need to find proof. Need to know if the horror story I’ve constructed in my head is real or just paranoid speculation born of too little sleep and too many secrets.
Bank statements. Old photographs. A birthday card from my grandmother, dead before I was old enough to remember her. A rent agreement for a flat in Bristol, dated 1998.
And letters. So many letters.
Most of them are from Grandad to Dad – short, practical missives about money and logistics.
Sending ￡200 for school fees. Hope you’re keeping well. W.
No emotion. No warmth. Just duty.
But underneath those, bundled separately, are the ones I’ve been avoiding. The ones in my father’s handwriting. His journals, his notes, his rambling confessions to no one.
I spread them across my lap and start to read.
It takes an hour.
An hour of my father’s cramped script, his half-finished thoughts, his guilt that soaks through every page. He writes about her constantly – never by name, just ‘she’ and ‘her’ and sometimes, when he’s being poetic, ‘my love’ or ‘my heart’.
It’s pathetic, really. This grown man, mooning over a woman like a lovesick teenager.
Except.
Except he was in agony. Real, consuming agony. The kind that doesn’t fade with time – it just calcifies, becomes part of you, a stone in your heart that you carry until it drags you under.
I dream of her still, he writes in one entry dated 2015. Twenty years and I still wake reaching for her side of the bed. What kind of man does that make me? What kind of father?
A bad one, I think. A bad one who loved someone more than he loved his own child.
And the anger rises, hot and sudden.
She was more important. Whoever she was. Whatever she did. His love for me couldn’t touch what he felt for her.
I set the letters down, breathing hard.
H.
The initial sits in my mind like a stone dropping into still water. All those unsent letters, all that grief – and they’re all for someone called H. Someone he loved more than he could say, more than he could send.
And then it surfaces. Clear as the day I arrived.
The post piled behind the door – council tax reminders, a water bill, lots and lots of bad-news brown envelopes.
I’d swept the whole lot into a black bin bag and shoved it in a kitchen cupboard, because I had too much else to deal with and unopened post felt like a problem for a future version of me.
But there’d been one that snagged my attention for a second.
Not a bill. Different paper. A looping feminine hand, a beacon amongst formal type.
I hadn’t opened it. Hadn’t thought about it since.
I’m on my feet before I’ve made a decision.
The bin bag is where I left it, shoved behind the cleaning products under the sink. I drag it out, crouch on the kitchen floor, and start pulling envelopes out one by one, dropping the bills in a pile until my fingers find it.
There it is.
Addressed to my father – Trelawney Cottage, Sea Salt Bay, Cornwall – in that same looping hand. The stamp is faded with age. The glue on the seal is old and brittle.
I go back to the box. And there, at the very bottom, tucked beneath everything else: a second envelope. Same handwriting. Same feminine script. But the postmark on this one reads 2006.
Neither has been opened.
He never read this. Either of them. All those years, and he never knew what they said.
My hands shake as I pick up the older one first.
My darling Gareth,
I’m writing this knowing I can never send it – or if I do, knowing you may never read it. But I need to say the words, even if only to paper.
I can’t leave with you. I’ve tried to convince myself otherwise, tried to imagine a life away from here, but I can’t do it to Kit and Jude.
They’re so young. Jude especially – he’s only nine, and he looks at me like I hung the moon.
How can I take myself away from that? How can I teach him that love means leaving?
I’m choosing to stay. For them. For my boys.
But please know that this choice is killing me. That I love you – have always loved you – and that if things were different, if I were braver or more selfish or less of a mother, I would run away with you tonight and never look back.
I’ll always love you.
H.
The letter shakes in my grip. I read it again. A third time.
She was going to stay. Helen Harding was going to stay with Reuben, stay in Sea Salt Bay, stay for her sons.
She chose them.
So what happened? Why did she leave?
I reach for the second envelope. 2020. Fourteen years later.
The seal breaks easily, the glue old and brittle. Inside, two pages covered in the same looping script – but different now. Heavier. The handwriting of someone older, wearier, carrying years of weight.
Dear Gareth,
I don’t know if this letter will reach you. I don’t know if you ever came back to the cottage, or if you’d even want to hear from me after all this time. But I have to try. I’ve spent twenty years living with silence, and I can’t do it anymore.
I never got to tell you the truth about why I left.
Reuben found out. About us, about everything. He told me to leave quietly – disappear, never contact the boys, let him tell whatever story he wanted – or he would destroy me. Turn Kit and Jude against me for ever. Make sure they believed I’d abandoned them for someone worthless.
I was a coward, Gareth. I took the quiet way out.
I’ve written to the boys so many times over the years. Birthday cards, Christmas letters, apologies, explanations. Reuben intercepted all of them. I only found out years later, when I hired someone to investigate. He made sure they never knew I’d tried.
They think I left because I didn’t love them enough. The opposite is true – I loved them so much I let Reuben convince me that disappearing was the kindest thing I could do.
I was wrong. I know that now.
But there are things you need to know. Facts I should have told you twenty years ago.
When I left Sea Salt Bay, I was pregnant.
Her name is Lily. She’s thirteen years old, and she’s ours, Gareth. Yours and mine. She has your eyes – that same grey-green that I fell in love with. She’s clever and fierce and full of questions, and lately all those questions are about her family.
She wants to know about her brothers. About you. About why she’s grown up without any of you in her life.
I don’t have good answers.
I’m living in Bristol now. I’ve written my address at the bottom of this letter. If you want to meet her – meet us – I’ll be here.
If you don’t, I understand. I’ve given up any right to ask things of you.
But please, Gareth. For Lily’s sake, if not for mine.
She deserves to know where she comes from.
All my love, still, always, Helen
The letter falls from my fingers.
I can’t breathe. The room is spinning – or I’m spinning, I can’t tell which.
Lily.
There’s a girl called Lily. Thirteen in 2020, which makes her nineteen or twenty now. And she’s—
She’s Helen and Gareth’s daughter.
Which means she’s Jude’s half-sister through his mother.
And she’s my half-sister through my father.
Jude and I share a sister.