Chapter Twenty-Seven
‘Let me show you,’ Gabby says, stepping out of the caravan.
As she holds her hand out for mine, James’s cry is loud, piercing. ‘Please, stop.’
His distress is rattling. It makes my heart land somewhere deep in the pit of my stomach — because whatever Gabby is about to reveal, he already knows. And why would he keep something as important as what happened to Robin from me unless . . .
‘Gabby, I’m begging you to stop. Leave us alone!’ he says beseechingly.
We ignore him, and I allow her to lead me around the back of the caravan, where the field stretches, untamed, the grass dry as brittle bones.
Right out in the centre of the field, nestled between thistles and brambles, is a cross.
It sticks out of the soil, leaning sadly to one side, weatherworn and rot-softened.
If I drop Skyla’s hand, or her mine, I can’t tell.
I fall to the ground and touch the split wood, not wanting to believe it.
Robin, my little songbird. She’s here. The cross itself is unmarked, her name isn’t visible, but somehow the second I see the burial site, I know.
This is Robin’s resting place. I feel it, the way a parent does sometimes.
A strong, unquestionable intuition. It’s the same as the feeling I get when I know Skyla isn’t okay, even when she tries her best to have me believe otherwise.
Robin’s energy is everywhere here. I’m not even a spiritual person, but I feel her so strongly, it’s overwhelming.
‘How long has she been dead?’ I snarl, unwavering in my strength. I will not break. Especially not now.
‘Twelve years.’ James speaks, approaching me slowly.
His tears are gone — in their place, a face void of emotion.
He goes towards Skyla but she shifts back, away from him, shaking her head.
She’s staring at her sister’s grave — eyes dry.
This is too much for her, and I fear she’ll never be able to recover from it.
How could she? How could anyone? Anger mangles my stomach as I turn to face my husband again.
‘Y-you knew? You knew this whole time that Robin is dead, and you never told me?’
‘I couldn’t — I just, I couldn’t,’ he stutters.
The grief I’ve held tightly onto for fourteen years threatens to pour out of me as an unnatural silence settles, swollen and unbearable.
Skyla scrambles to her feet, her knees dirty, lower lip wavering.
She doesn’t say anything, but she gives us a look that could physically destroy me.
One of such pain and anguish that I stop breathing.
She hurtles off through the field, away from us, her tangle of curls trailing along behind her.
The mother in me wants to chase after her, but the mother in me also can’t leave Robin now I have finally found her.
My hand stays pressed firmly to the soil. I don’t break contact. I won’t.
‘What happened to her?’ I ask, cutting through the quiet that Skyla left behind. No part of me wants to know the answer to this question — but without knowing I don’t think there will ever truly be any closure, even though she has been found.
James glances at Gabby and I want to grab his face in my hands and tell him not to look at her.
To look at me, his wife! To tell me what I’ve needed to know for over a decade.
A truth he’s kept from me all this time, allowed me to hope, to dream, to pray despite my not being religious.
How could he do this to me? My eyes rove over him.
He’s unrecognisable to me now. A stranger.
‘Gabby forced me to give her one of the twins back,’ James whispers. ‘She said if I didn’t, she’d come forward and tell you about the affair. About the baby. I didn’t want to lose you.’
I don’t believe it. His selfishness astounds me, but before I can even fully comprehend what he’s telling me, he continues.
‘We only ever wanted one child. It’s what we always said, didn’t we? One and done. Having two of them, constantly needing something at the same time, it was exhausting, Bella. I was so tired. The twins were so young, I thought, how bad would it be giving one back to their birth mother?’
The man I always thought him to be fades away right before my eyes.
Pathetic. He’s pathetic. Hatred pulses through me.
They were our responsibility. All this time, I’d thought I’d failed her.
But it was James, the man I trusted. This brings the saying ‘always the husband’ into a whole new light.
He took our little girl from her cot late at night when he was supposed to be keeping her safe and gave her up to protect himself, to cover up his lie.
‘What happened to her?’ I ask again, turning back to my daughter’s grave, my eyes seeing but still not registering. Not really.
‘She choked,’ Gabby says, two words said so simply for something so crushing.
‘I’d only gone for a shower, left her and Raven watching something on telly with a bowl of grapes.
I hadn’t sliced them up. I always sliced them up, but that day, I didn’t.
I don’t know why.’ She kneels down beside me and touches the earth, the place where Robin is buried.
I want to push her away, to scream at her to get away from my daughter — I can’t bring myself to accept that Robin was her daughter too.
I look up, wishing the tears in her eyes made me feel any better, but it doesn’t. It only angers me more. Looking at her, only one word enters my head: murderer.
‘I tried, you know, tried to save her. Her little body was so tiny in my arms, I didn’t know what I was doing.
I tried to remember the First Aid training, we did that together for work, remember, Bella?
I jammed my fist into her abdomen, but I couldn’t do it.
I couldn’t get it out. She went blue, then floppy and then she just .
. . stopped breathing, stopped fighting. ’
‘For the longest time I’d tried to pretend that Robin and Raven were twins. There was such a tiny age gap, you couldn’t even really notice a difference between them,’ she sniffs.
‘I told James I needed Skyla back after what happened to Robin, told him that she was mine. Not yours,’ Gabby continues. ‘But he threatened to go to the police, tell them what happened to Robin, said he’d tell them I killed her if I came anywhere near your family again.’
James drags himself over to the grave, reaching out and rubbing his thumb over the cross. ‘It was too late to save Robin, but I did what I could to save Skyla,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t let Gabby near her, or you. I felt like I finally had some sort of leverage, and I used it.’
He grimaces, as though he absolutely hates himself, and that’s when I see that he does.
He hates what he’s done just as much as I do — and he’s had to live with himself all these years, harbouring a secret so awful it must have destroyed him.
His distance suddenly makes sense. He withdrew from me because he couldn’t handle what he’d done — and he had to watch silently as I crumbled apart, going slowly mad from the disappearance of our daughter, from having no answers for so many broken years.
‘I watched Skyla grow up with you, even after we moved away to Liverpool. I kept my eye on you, I couldn’t not .
. .’ Gabby gestures back to the caravan where all of those newspapers litter the countertops.
‘All I wanted to do was take her back. But I couldn’t.
Raven realised I had this sort of . . . unhealthy obsession when she was old enough, and that’s when she started digging into things herself.
She realised who you were — who James was to her.
I guess she’s been coming to see you, has she? ’
Raven stands mutely at the end of the grave.
‘You didn’t know she was staying with us?’ I ask, batting a fly from my face.
‘Staying with you? No! Of course not.’ She turns to Raven. ‘How dare you?’
‘I just wanted to be a part of a real family.’ She looks up brokenly. ‘Knowing I had a dad — and a sister. I wanted to be part of that world.’
‘That was never the plan!’ Gabby yells, grabbing Raven’s shirt and shaking her.
‘Get your hands off her,’ James says. He pulls her away, protecting his daughter.
‘What was the plan then?’ I ask, unable to watch the moment James and Raven share.
‘To make your life a living hell — the way you made mine.’
I blink in shock. I made her life hell? How? I didn’t intentionally take her babies. They were legally put into my care. I didn’t choose them, but I loved them with my whole heart.
I think of all the torment I’ve endured over these last few weeks. I knew I wasn’t imagining it. Everything had been real, not in my head.
‘Raven went off-piste.’ Gabby throws her head in Raven’s direction. If looks could kill.
‘I deserved to get to know my father!’ she screams, then flickers her eyes to me.
‘You have this perfect life. The big house, the family. You took my dad and my sister from me. I hated you — but I thought, if I could have you believe I was Robin, maybe you’d accept me into your home.
But you didn’t. You didn’t want anything to do with me from the very start, did you?
’ Her nostrils flare as she fights back tears.
‘I know Gabby wished it had been me that had choked on that grape, me who had died,’ she mutters darkly.
‘My whole life I’ve never felt good enough.
Do you know what it was like growing up with her, desperate to pretend she had the twins back?
She never realised how that made me feel.
I was constantly living in the twins’ shadows. ’
‘Oh, Raven,’ I say, wishing there was something I could do or say to make her feel better. I feel awful for the way I’ve treated her, even though there’s no way I could’ve known why she was being so hard to me all the time.
‘Gabriella Crisell,’ a voice booms from across the field.
‘You are under arrest for the abduction of Robin Rushmore, for perverting the course of justice and for preventing a lawful and decent burial.’ DCI Gary Quinn descends on Gabby, pushing her roughly to the ground, her face forced into the dirt that has settled over Robin’s place of rest.
‘You have the right to remain silent but know it could hurt your defence if you don’t mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you say may be given in evidence in a court of law. Have I made myself clear?’
Gabby nods as she’s effortlessly lifted to her feet. A team of police storm in around us from every direction. I whip round, turning towards my husband. He’s holding his phone out in front of him.
‘I called the police,’ he says quietly. ‘They heard the entire story.’
I swallow, hard. James has managed to eke a confession out of Gabby — and in so doing, he’s handed himself in too. I watch as he’s pinioned to the ground, his arms placed behind his back and his wrists cuffed. He’s read his rights, and he’s gone. Whisked away from me without so much as a goodbye.
The scene unfolds in front of me, and I stay still, unsure what to do with myself.
Part of me wants to lie down over Robin’s grave, press myself as close to her remains as I can.
I’m finally reunited with her, and I don’t want to leave her here, out in an overgrown field.
I know she will be exhumed, that she can’t stay here, but for now it feels the closest I can ever come to holding her again is by digging myself into this earth right here, right now.
Tears come, as the realisation hits me how long she’s been out here, all alone. My heart breaks in a way it has never broken before; the final shard of glass keeping me together has come away and I shatter right there.
Eventually a police officer, a woman, crouches down beside me. Her perfume is sweet, pulling me from the depths of my despair.
‘I’m so sorry, Mrs Rushmore,’ she sighs at the sight of my daughter’s grave.
Somewhere close by, someone has lit a fire, charred oak drifting up with the wind.
I gasp in breaths between sobs, inhaling woodsmoke, sharp and acrid, and I wonder if I’ll ever be able to enjoy that perfectly cosy autumnal scent ever again.
Or will I always associate it with this day?
The day I found out my daughter is dead and has been this entire time.
‘Is there anything I can do? Someone I can call?’
‘Skyla. I need to see Skyla,’ I murmur, knowing the only person who can come close to healing me now is the one person who has kept me strong through this entire nightmare. This nightmare that is finally, finally over.
‘We’ve got her. She’s okay,’ the officer whispers before her attention turns to Raven, a girl even younger and more fragile than Skyla in so many ways.
She’s just witnessed her mother get taken away, her father too — and her life is about to be turned upside down.
Social services will swoop in on her, and from the naked fear I see in her now, I know she’s stripped of all her defences.
Being ten months younger than Skyla, she’s still very much a child in the eyes of the law.
Will she go to a foster family, a children’s home?
A thought flickers through my mind before I can stop it.
Should I offer to take her? She is family, after all.
Whether I want her to be or not — it isn’t just James she shares a connection with, it’s Skyla too. She is Skyla’s little sister.
Despite everything she did to me, I want to reach out and comfort her, to protect her from the things I know I can’t control.
This girl who I have wanted nothing to do with for weeks, who I wished would disappear — suddenly I can’t seem to fathom what she’s about to go through.
This is only going to wreck her more than she already is — and there’s nothing I can do about it.
Even if there was, would I open my home up to her?
She’s a young girl in need, and I’m not awful, but could I look at her every day knowing she is James’s daughter, the produce of an affair .
. . and Skyla’s sister? Would the system even let me help her if I asked?
The questions mount, and as they do, Raven rises, wandering off into the sea of blue and red police lights. Watching her walk away, Carol steps close to me and puts an arm on my shoulder. I lean into her, my friend, one of the only people in this world I can truly trust.
I know as much as I want to help Raven, I can’t.
My job is to keep Skyla safe, and Raven has proven that she is reckless — I cannot live my life in fear that she will harm Skyla, Alfie or me.
I won’t. Raven is in the hands of the system now — and maybe that’s exactly what she needs.
I try to tell myself that, but the words ‘structure’ and ‘safety’ don’t exist in the world Raven is about to enter.
Getting to my feet, I take one last look at Robin’s grave, letting out a deep, long sigh before turning towards the sirens blaring from the gate. I need to be with Skyla now. She is my priority.