Chapter 34
Chapter Thirty-Four
brYNN
For a long moment, neither of us moves.
Jude’s hands are still on the steering wheel. His knuckles are white. He’s staring at me through the windscreen like I might disappear if he blinks.
The passenger door opens first.
Kit.
I haven’t seen him since I was a child, but I’d know him anywhere – the Harding jaw, the dark hair. He’s broader than Jude, a little taller, but they have the same eyes. Helen’s eyes.
He looks at me. Then at the house behind me. Then back at me.
‘Is she—’
‘Inside.’ My voice is steadier than I feel. ‘With Lily.’
Kit makes a sound that’s almost wounded animal. The same sound I heard from Helen when I told her Gareth was dead.
The back door of the truck opens. A small figure tumbles out with messy hair, and a wide, gap-toothed grin, already talking.
‘Is this the house? It’s got a red door. I like red doors. Uncle Jude said—’
‘Maisie.’ Kit’s voice is gentle but firm. ‘Give me a second, sweetheart.’
Jude still hasn’t moved.
The front door opens behind me.
‘Brynn? I thought I heard—’
Helen’s voice dies in her throat.
I turn. She’s standing in the doorway, one hand on the frame, the other pressed to her chest. Her face is ghostly.
‘Kit,’ she breathes. ‘Jude.’
And then she’s moving – down the steps, down the path, past me like I’m not even there. Her eyes are fixed on her sons, on the men they’ve become, on the twenty years she’s missed.
Kit meets her halfway.
The sound Helen makes when she reaches him isn’t quite human. It’s grief and joy and relief all tangled together, ripped from somewhere deep. She grabs him – both hands fisting in his jacket – and for a moment they just stand there, holding on like they’re afraid the other will vanish.
‘I’m sorry,’ Helen’s saying, the words tumbling out between sobs. ‘I’m so sorry. I tried to come back, I tried to write, I never stopped thinking about you—’
‘I know.’ Kit’s voice is wrecked. Broken open. ‘Mum. I know. We found the letters.’
‘I thought you hated me. I thought Reuben had made sure—’
‘He did.’ Kit pulls back just enough to look at her face. His cheeks are wet. ‘He told us you didn’t want us. That you left because we weren’t enough.’
Helen makes that sound again. That shattered, keening noise.
‘You were always enough. Always.’ She grips his jacket tighter, as if the words might fly away if she doesn’t anchor them.
‘He gave me a choice, Kit. Two choices, and neither of them was really a choice at all.’ She pulls a ragged breath.
‘He said I could leave quietly – just go, no fuss, and he’d tell you I’d decided this life wasn’t for me anymore.
That I’d chosen to leave. You’d hurt, but you’d be …
intact. Or—’ Her voice fractures. ‘Or I could stay and fight him. And if I fought, he’d tell you everything.
The affair. The pregnancy. Every ugly detail.
He said he’d make sure you knew exactly what kind of woman your mother was.
He’d rather destroy your image of both your parents than let me win. ’
Kit’s face is white. ‘So you left to protect us.’
‘I left because I thought a clean wound would heal faster than a poisoned one.’ She’s crying too hard to keep her voice steady but the words keep coming, years of them, dammed up and finally breaking through.
‘I thought if you believed I’d simply chosen to go, you’d grieve and move on.
I thought that was kinder than knowing the truth – that your father was capable of this.
That your mother had—’ She can’t finish.
‘But he poisoned it anyway,’ Kit says quietly. ‘Just differently.’
‘Yes.’ Helen’s whole body shakes. ‘He told you I didn’t want you. He made the clean wound dirty. And I wasn’t there to— I couldn’t—’
‘I know,’ Kit says. ‘We read it. All of it.’
He pulls her back in. Holds her the way I imagine he’s wanted to hold her for twenty years – like a little boy hanging on with all of his strength to something he doesn’t want to lose.
Jude’s out of the truck now. Standing by the bonnet, watching. His face is doing something complicated. Emotions flicker too fast to name. He looks like he wants to move forward but doesn’t know how.
Maisie tugs on his hand.
‘Uncle Jude? Who’s that lady hugging Daddy?’
Jude swallows hard. ‘That’s … that’s your grandmother, Mais.’
Maisie’s eyes go wide. ‘I have another grandmother?’
‘Yeah.’ His voice cracks. ‘You do.’
Maisie looks at Helen – still wrapped around Kit, still crying – and then back at Jude. Processing.
‘She seems sad,’ Maisie says.
‘She’s not sad. She’s—’ Jude stops. Tries again. ‘Sometimes when people are really, really happy, it looks like sad. Because there’s too much feeling to hold inside.’
Maisie considers this with the gravity of an eight-and-a-half-year-old philosopher.
‘That’s weird,’ she decides. ‘But okay.’
Helen finally releases Kit. Turns towards Jude.
The space between them feels vast. Twenty years of silence. Twenty years of believing she’d abandoned him. Twenty years of Jude being the one who stayed, the spare son, the good soldier – all of it built on a lie.
‘Jude.’ Helen’s voice is barely a whisper.
He doesn’t move.
‘I know you’re angry,’ she says. ‘You have every right to be. I left you. I let him tell you I didn’t care. I—’
‘You were pregnant.’
The words cut through everything.
Helen goes still.
‘When you left,’ Jude continues. His voice is flat. Controlled. ‘You were carrying Lily. And you never told us.’
‘I couldn’t. Reuben would have—’
‘We had a sister. For nineteen years, we had a sister, and we didn’t know.’
‘I know.’ Helen’s crying again. ‘I know. I wanted to tell you. I wrote so many letters trying to explain – but the ones I sent to Gareth’s cottage went to an empty house because they’d already moved, and the ones I sent to your father’s address—’
‘He burned them,’ Jude says. ‘Every one.’
‘I only found out years later. By then I’d stopped writing. I thought the silence meant none of you wanted to hear from me.’
‘We didn’t know there was anything to hear.’
The brutality of it. Twenty years of parallel grief. Helen writing into a void. Gareth writing into a void. The boys growing up believing they’d been abandoned. And Reuben at the centre of it all, burning bridges he’d convinced everyone else had chosen to cross.
‘You could have tried harder.’
The words hang in the air. Brutal. True.
Helen flinches like she’s been struck.
Kit steps forward. ‘Jude—’
‘No.’ Jude holds up a hand. ‘I’m not – I’m not saying this to hurt you.
I’m saying it because I need you to understand what it was like.
’ He turns slightly, and for the first time his eyes find Kit’s.
‘Kit and I grew up thinking our mother didn’t want us.
And I – I was the one who stayed. Even when I wanted to leave.
Even when every part of me was screaming to go. ’
Kit’s face changes. Something shifts behind his eyes – recognition, or the beginning of it.
‘I gave up everything,’ Jude says. His voice breaks on everything, and I watch Kit register it – the weight of a word he’s never heard his brother use like this.
‘The future I’d been planning since I was fifteen.
Because I thought I owed Dad something. Because I thought if I was good enough, loyal enough, if I just kept my head down and ran the business and never complained – maybe it would make up for you leaving. ’
Kit opens his mouth. Closes it. His expression is stricken – not just at Helen’s revelation, but at Jude’s. I didn’t know you felt this way is written across his face in letters ten feet high.
‘Jude—’ Kit starts.
‘Not now.’ Jude’s voice is quiet but final. He turns back to Helen. ‘And it was all for nothing. Because you didn’t leave. You were forced out. And he let me spend twenty years feeling like I wasn’t enough.’
The silence that follows is immense.
Then Helen does something I don’t expect. She doesn’t defend herself. Doesn’t make excuses. She just walks towards Jude, slowly, carefully, like approaching a lion with a splinter in its paw.
‘You’re right,’ she says quietly. ‘I should have tried harder. I should have fought for you. I let fear make my decisions, and you paid the price.’ She stops in front of him.
Close enough to touch, but not touching.
‘I can’t give you back those twenty years.
I can’t undo what your dad did, or what I let happen.
But I’m here now. And I’m not leaving again. Not ever.’
Jude stares at her.
I can see the war on his face. The anger and the grief and the desperate, childlike want underneath it all. The nine-year-old boy who woke up one morning and his mother was gone.
‘I don’t know how to do this,’ he says. ‘I don’t know how to just … forgive you.’
‘I’m not asking you to forgive me.’ Helen reaches up. Touches his face – tentative, trembling. ‘I’m asking you to let me try. Let me earn it back. However long it takes.’
Jude closes his eyes.
And then he’s in her arms.
Not the desperate, clinging embrace Kit gave her. Something quieter. More careful. Like he’s testing whether it’s safe to let himself need her again.
But he’s there. He’s letting her hold him.
And Helen – Helen looks like someone who’s been drowning for twenty years and finally, finally found air.
Lily appears in the doorway.
She’s been watching from inside – I saw her face at the window earlier, pale and uncertain. But now she’s stepping out, arms wrapped around herself, looking at Kit and Jude like they might not be real.
Kit sees her first.
‘Lily,’ Helen says, pulling back from Jude but keeping one hand on his arm. ‘Come here. Come meet your brothers.’
Brothers.
The word ripples through all of us.
Lily walks down the path. Stops a few feet away. She’s trying to look casual, but I can see her hands shaking.
‘So,’ she says. ‘You’re Kit and Jude.’
Kit almost laughs. ‘Yeah. We are.’
‘I’ve seen pictures. Mum has an album.’ Lily glances at Helen. ‘She used to look at it when she thought I was asleep.’