Chapter 33 #2
‘Can I ask you something?’ I say. ‘About Dad. Not the letters, not the leaving. Just … him. What he was like. Before.’
Helen’s face shadows, layers of history and unforgotten pasts flicking across the surface of her skin. Pain, yes, but underneath it – light. Like sunshine through a cracked window.
‘He was funny,’ she says. ‘That’s the thing people forget, or maybe they never knew.
He could make you laugh until you couldn’t breathe.
This dry, quiet wit – he’d say something so deadpan you wouldn’t realise it was a joke until thirty seconds later, and by then he’d already moved on.
’ She smiles, and it’s the youngest I’ve ever seen her look.
‘And his hands. God, his hands. He could fix anything – engines, generators, a clock that hadn’t worked since 1974.
He’d be elbow-deep in an engine block, covered in grease, humming sea shanties to himself like he was the happiest man alive.
And I’d watch him from the harbour wall and think: that’s the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen. ’
My throat aches. Because I know those hands. I inherited them – the mechanical instinct, the need to understand how things work, the way a seized bolt feels like a personal challenge.
‘He sounds like someone I would have liked,’ I say, my throat squeezing in a way so painful, I have to breathe through my nose.
‘You would have. I believe he’d have been so proud of you, Brynn.’
‘He didn’t tell me that, not very often.’ My memories ache with the silence that used to live between us, this awful deadly silence that I thought I’d caused. That somehow, even though I was a child and didn’t know what I’d said or done, whatever it had been must have been wrong.
‘He wouldn’t have known how. Your father was brilliant at fixing things and terrible at saying what he felt. On paper, with no one watching, he could say everything. Face to face, he just … froze.’
I blink, once, twice, my eyes stinging, but deep in my chest where I’ve kept all this crap, all the guilt, the fear, the fucking anger, it moves, not much, maybe nothing more than a minuscule amount, but it moves none the less. Eases.
I think about Jude. About the way he could tell me everything at sunrise in a hidden cove but couldn’t look at me in a pub.
‘Will you come?’ I ask. ‘To Sea Salt Bay. To see them? Jude and Kit,’ I clarify, although I don’t need to. Helen’s hands tighten on her mug.
‘Brynn—’
‘They know now. About Reuben, about the letters, about everything. Jude heard it from his father’s own mouth.’ I step closer. ‘They’ve spent twenty years thinking you didn’t want them. Don’t you want to tell them the truth yourself?’
‘Of course I do.’ Her voice cracks. ‘I’ve imagined it a thousand times. Showing up on their doorstep, explaining everything.’
‘Then come with me. We could drive down together. Today.’
Helen sets the mug down carefully. Her hands are trembling.
‘It’s not that simple.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because what if they don’t want to see me?’ The words come out raw. Exposed. ‘I walked away from them, Brynn. I let Reuben convince them I didn’t care.’
‘You didn’t have a choice. He forced you out—’
‘I could have fought harder. I could have gone to the police, hired a solicitor, done something other than disappear.’ She presses her fingers to her eyes.
‘It seems so futile now. I’ve placed all my life into letters.
How pathetic. In a letter, something so small and insignificant it can get lost, wet and damaged, pushed through the wrong door…
I’ve been a fool, Brynn, and I don’t think I can face them and have them judge me for that. ’
The tragedy of it sits between us.
‘You can’t get those years back. But you can stop the silence.’
Helen laughs – a broken sound. ‘Reuben’s just had a heart attack. I can hardly show up at his bedside and demand answers.’
‘Why not? He owes you answers. He owes all of us answers.’
‘Because I’m terrified.’ The admission comes out barely above a whisper. ‘I’m terrified I’ll walk into that village and Kit and Jude will look at me the way Reuben wanted them to. Like I’m nothing. Like I was never their mother at all.’
I think about Jude’s face in the hospital room. The way he looked at me when he realised I’d kept something from him.
I understand that fear. More than I want to.
‘They won’t,’ I say, but even I can hear the uncertainty.
‘You don’t know that.’ Helen wipes her eyes with the back of her hand.
‘Lily’s been asking me for years to reach out to them.
To find them, write to them, something. And I kept saying, When the time is right.
But the truth is, I was hiding behind that phrase because I couldn’t bear the thought of them rejecting me. ’
‘So what – you’re just going to wait here for ever?’
‘No.’ She straightens. Pulls herself together, brick by brick, the same way I’ve watched Jude do a hundred times. The same careful reassembly. Like mother, like son, and neither of them knows it. ‘I just need to think. You turning up has changed everything.’
I think about my own father. About all the letters he wrote but never sent. About him dying alone in that Bristol hospital ward, convinced the woman he loved had abandoned him, when the truth was they’d been writing to each other across a void.
Sometimes people aren’t ready. Sometimes the fear is bigger than the want.
But sometimes waiting is just another word for giving up.
‘They’ll want to see you,’ I say. ‘I know they will.’
‘Maybe.’ Helen takes my hands in hers again.
She studies my face. That same searching look she’s been giving me all week – looking for traces of Gareth, of the man she loved and lost.
‘He’s lucky, you know,’ she says quietly. ‘My son. He’s lucky you found those letters. Lucky you came here instead of burning them.’
‘I’d never have burned them. My sister is here, and I’ve wanted to be a sister all my life.’
Something crosses Helen’s face – gratitude so fierce it looks like pain.
She releases my hands, steps back. ‘Harding men are stubborn. God knows I have experience with that. But they’re not stupid. Give him time.’
‘I’ve given him a week.’
‘Sometimes it takes longer.’ She smiles, but it’s sad, a little knowing. ‘Sometimes it takes twenty years.’
The daffodils are still nodding along the path.
The red door gleams behind me. Somewhere inside, Lily’s probably watching from the window – she’ll have her phone out, ready to fire off the first of approximately nine thousand Snapchats before I’ve even reached the motorway.
It’s the only acceptable form of communication between sisters, apparently.
I’m halfway down the garden path when I hear the car.
An engine, getting closer. Slowing down.
I look up.
A truck – battered, salt-stained, unmistakably Cornish – is pulling up to the kerb.
And behind the wheel, looking like he hasn’t slept in days, is Jude.