Chapter Twenty-Six
‘Haven’t told me what?’ I ask, watching as he starts to sob, a violent wracking sob.
It makes Skyla start to cry, too, whether it be from confusion or fear or both, I don’t know.
It’s hard enough as a parent seeing your child cry, but for her to see her father so upset, I can’t even imagine what must be going through her head.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he chokes out between sharp intakes of breath. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’
Sorry for what, I want to ask, but I don’t get the chance. Gabby interrupts his blubbering.
‘Sorry for cheating? For lying?’ she screams. ‘For choosing her over me and Raven?’ The look she gives me could slice right through glass.
‘Cheating and lying?’ I repeat her words questioningly.
What is she talking about? How did James cheat and lie?
I have always trusted my husband implicitly, even after we stopped being intimate.
I’ve always been sure the only thing he’d ever do is watch a bit of pornography — and I’ve never been someone that has cared too much about that.
Gabby limps over to Raven, putting a hand on her shoulder, and Raven, so frangible, seems to sag with the extra weight. She surveys a mouldy cardboard box, refusing to look up.
‘My daughter and I deserved the life James gave you,’ Gabby growls, her fingernails digging into Raven’s neck.
‘You aren’t Raven’s mother. You can’t be,’ I say, my head spinning, thinking about the DNA results, the letter confirming that Skyla and Raven share fifty percent of their genetic markers.
There’s no way Raven forged that document.
There could be a million reasons she had an envelope in her hands when she was inside our house.
It can’t have been the one from DNA Match.
I’m being paranoid, jumping to conclusions.
No, if that letter is true, Gabby cannot be Raven’s mother — because that would mean she’s Skyla’s too.
‘Are you?’ I frown, wondering if it is somehow possible, if I had adopted my colleague’s babies fifteen years ago. I grip on to Skyla just that little bit tighter, scared to let her go, knowing she’s hearing things that will make no sense to her. Perhaps they never will.
‘I think,’ Gabby says, slowly, ‘the question you should be asking is if James is Raven’s father.’
James swears under his breath, raking his hands through his hair the way I know he does when he’s stressed. A nervous tic he doesn’t know he has, but I know it. I know it well.
‘James?’ I ask, incredulous, standing to make myself feel braver than I am. ‘What is she talking about?’ I don’t want to believe it. It can’t be true. It can’t, it can’t, it can’t!
‘Dad?’ Skyla trembles in my arms. I wish I could protect her from this, but I can’t, and it feels as though my entire world has just splintered apart.
‘You’re Raven’s dad? What is she talking about?’ She shakes her head, then turns to Raven, and I have never seen her look so wounded. ‘You knew?’
Raven looks down at her hands on the table, her mouth parting, but she doesn’t speak. Her chest rises and falls rapidly, like she’s about to crack. Skyla’s disbelief roots as she gives James a look so hollow and broken; I can’t cope. There have been so many lies lately. So many secrets.
‘Just tell us the truth,’ I whisper, stroking Skyla’s curls from her face.
I know now whatever the truth is, it’s going to hurt, and I don’t want to hear it, but I know that I need to.
It’s the only way forward, now with us all in this compact mobile home; the truth has crawled from dark corners, chasing us here.
Cornering us here. Unrelenting, harsh but vital.
‘Things were tough, we’d been struggling to fall pregnant for a while,’ James mumbles, and I blink reality into existence.
James had an affair. He just confirmed it.
My ears ring with the painstaking truth of his confession.
He fathered a child. Gabby’s child. Raven.
My weight is too much for my knees and I reach out for the caravan to steady myself.
‘So you fucked my colleague?’ I seethe, my confusion already starting to be replaced with fury.
‘I didn’t know she got pregnant,’ James sobs. ‘Not at first.’
Those last three words drive the sword between my ribcage.
‘Not at first?’ I repeat, slowly.
‘How could I? Before you got your PCOS diagnosis I’d always assumed I was the problem,’ he says quietly. ‘I didn’t think I could have children.’ He glances at Raven, his daughter . . . his daughter! Has he known she’s his all this time while she’s been living under our roof? The thought sickens me.
‘We’d had the twins less than a month, Bella.
I was overwhelmed with it all, how sudden it had all been.
They just arrived. There was hardly any warning.
I know we used to say how ready we were to start a family, but that was too quick.
Overnight we became parents — that’s what it felt like to me, anyway.
I tried so hard to be strong for you, to not show you how much I was struggling with it — but I was.
I went out drinking a lot and one night . . . I-I met Gabby.’
‘But — she was my colleague!’ I cry, unsure if I’m madder at the affair or that it was with her. Someone I know. Someone close enough to me to make this feel very, very personal.
‘I didn’t know she was your colleague that night,’ he says, as though that helps in his defence in any way. I wish it did, but it doesn’t. He still cheated. He cheated!
My frown deepens. ‘Wait,’ I say slowly. ‘You said we had the twins less than a month.’
He nods, shamefaced.
‘I don’t understand.’ I pull at a clump of my hair in frustration. This doesn’t make any sense.
‘I know, and I’m so sorry, Bella. I really am,’ he blubbers.
There’s no time for his self-pity, and I don’t care about his apology.
It’s not his infidelity I don’t understand, it’s how we had the twins when he had the affair and got Gabby pregnant.
That isn’t possible, because I know that Raven is Skyla’s twin sister from the DNA test results.
Is he lying to me, or is Gabby lying to him?
It’s not unheard of for a woman to have an affair and trick the man into believing he got her pregnant. Is that what she’s done?
I look at him and wonder if the DNA test results is a card I need to hold close to my chest, and for now I can’t decide.
‘You.’ I twist towards Gabby, feeling more and more claustrophobic in this space as each second passes. ‘Did you know?’
Gabby bubbles with laughter. ‘Know that James was your husband? Bella, of course I did!’
James thrashes his head left to right, sobbing into his chest. ‘She tricked me,’ he mumbles into his chest, not to me, not to anyone. To himself. As though he’s only just realising it.
‘Why?’ I ask her, refusing to listen to my body that somehow still feels the urge to comfort James, even after what he’s done. He cheated, I remind myself, incensed.
‘You took my daughters,’ she says, as though she’s explaining something to a child, her words slow, dripping in satire.
‘What?’ I search her face, trying to understand.
‘I’ll admit I gave them up after they were born, didn’t think I was ready to be a parent. By the time I realised I’d made a mistake, it was too late. They were already yours. Yours! Suppose I have Harper to thank for that.’ Gabby tosses her head in James’s direction.
Harper? What does she have to do with any of this? And then it clicks. She’s a family support worker. Could she have somehow arranged this? But if she did, why? Why give us Gabby’s twins?
‘I signed the consent forms after six weeks the way I was told to do — but when I went back and said I’d made a mistake, I was told the Adoption Order had already been granted. That it was too late.’
‘Skyla and Robin were yours?’ I ask, pressing my fingertips into the corners of my eyes.
Gabby nods, her mouth starting to quiver. ‘Do you know how hard it was, being around you every day at work knowing you had my little girls? I hated you!’
I wrap my arms around myself, shivering.
The grass outside the caravan sways in the September breeze, a sharp wind screaming inside, so strong it could have stolen my breath if it hadn’t been taken already.
There should have been some sort of legalities in place for something like this, a way to make sure the twins’ birth mother didn’t cross paths with us.
Letting us take on twins from a colleague — either someone hadn’t done their job properly or someone was heavily involved in making this happen.
Harper. Why would she do this? I grind my teeth together, working my jaw, enamel grating.
‘And you only slept with Gabby after we had the twins?’ I turn to James.
‘Yes. Bella, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.’
Raven can’t be Robin. Relief and confusion crash together inside me.
If Raven is James’s child, and he had her from an affair after the twins were in our care, that means Raven isn’t Skyla’s twin.
The DNA results are wrong. Somehow, they’re wrong.
I look down at Skyla, rigid in my arms, then up to Raven, trying to catch a glimpse of the age gap that must be between them — but it’s so hard.
She meets my gaze, her face darkening. There is an unkindness in Raven’s eyes as she juts her chin forward, something ugly crossing over her features .
. . and that’s when I know. She tricked me, like a raven is known to do in Native American and even Slavic mythology, she’s lived up to her name, tampered with the results.
I know she has; it’s written all over her twisted little face.
I want to ask her why, ask her what she gained from doing something so awful, and why she would want to make me believe she was Robin — but Gabby continues speaking before I get the chance.
‘Obviously after giving the twins up, I wasn’t breastfeeding.
My breasts got all hard, dried up, excruciating to the touch — not that you’d know anything about how that feels, Bella.
I started ovulating pretty quickly after that.
Meeting James in the pub wasn’t difficult; people are creatures of habit after all. ’
Creatures of habit? But James hardly drinks.
I think back, my head starting to throb.
We both drank to numb our pain back in our thirties, when infertility could have broken us .
. . should have broken us. I must have been so consumed in my own mental turmoil that I hadn’t noticed James was struggling too.
The twins had enveloped me. I went from one extreme to the other.
My insatiable need to be pregnant was silenced by the girls, who in a single moment became my entire universe.
It had been hard, so hard I barely had time to breathe — and I guess that I dived headfirst into mothering these two tiny babies so completely that I didn’t even think about how James was handling everything.
He did go out a lot, but I had been so busy that at the time I hadn’t even noticed he was gone sometimes.
‘I was pregnant again less than two months after the birth of the twins,’ Gabby says, and the words add insult to injury. She looks at me, smugly, her fertility the catalyst for whatever I might do next.
Despite Skyla’s world unravelling right in front of her, she rubs my arm, her turn to cradle me.
It calms me when I need it most, because every cell in my body is fighting the urge to fling myself at Gabby and grab her by the throat.
Rage, jealousy, betrayal. It’s all coursing through me and I don’t know what to do, so I stay mute, taking it all in, letting it sink deeper into my consciousness.
‘Please, Gabby, just stop,’ James begs. ‘She’s heard enough. She’s been through enough!’
He reaches out for me, but I pull away — and it isn’t James’s pain I care about from how I just retracted, it’s Skyla’s. We are meant to be Skyla’s safety net and not only has that net just been torn wide open, she’s also just come face to face with her birth mother for the first time.
I know she’s wondered who her birth mother is over the years.
She’s always told me it wouldn’t change anything, but I’ve always been terrified of her birth mother coming back into the picture.
Wanting a relationship with her, demanding answers I can’t answer about Robin.
Where is she? And now she’s here I’m starting to wonder, does she even care?
I glance up at Raven again. ‘You aren’t Robin,’ I say, not a question, not really, though my words are laced with uncertainty.
Gabby shakes her head. ‘Raven was born ten months later,’ she says, staring as I do the maths myself. I try to make sense of all this, but it’s making my brain ache.
Raven isn’t Robin. Raven is just Raven, a little girl ten months younger than the twins. Their sister, and James’s biological daughter. There’s a burning in my chest, bile working its way up into my throat. Ten months. There’s no wonder I didn’t notice an age gap.
As much as I want to confront the topic of the affair, and I do, my focus shifts to something else. Something much more important.
‘If Raven isn’t Robin — then where is my daughter?’ As the words leave me, I’m surprised by the strength in them. They are solid, fully formed. I will not cry. I will not crumble. I will remain strong, for Robin. I owe it to her to find her.
‘She was my daughter! Not yours!’ Gabby barks, spittle flying from her mouth in her rage.
Out of the corner of my eye, James claws at his face. He’s hysterical, falling out of the caravan, drool dripping from his mouth onto the parched earth. Why is he crying? What does he know? And why did Gabby refer to Robin in the past tense? Was. She said Robin was her daughter.
‘Where is my sister?’ Skyla bellows — and I must remember that this is about her, too.
I cannot be selfish right now, as much as I’d love to be.
Her world is reshaping as these revelations come and that can’t be easy for her.
And yet, there is no way I can protect her from this.
The truth is coming out, whether we like it or not.