Chapter Thirty-Eight
I closed the fridge door, pausing the way I did every single time to look at the ultrasound photograph held there with a pineapple-shaped fridge magnet.
‘Hello, little one, remember me? I’m your God-mummy,’ I said, kissing my fingertips and gently pressing them onto the sepia-coloured face in the photo. ‘We’re going to have such fun together, you and me.’
I startled guiltily at a sound from the doorway which had made me jump. I looked over my shoulder to find Rhys standing there, leaning against the doorframe with an expression on his face I’d never seen before.
‘Okay. I know. I’m officially crazy, talking to my fridge.’
He shook his head, a smile slowly covering his face like a sunrise.
‘Not at all. I love how much you already love that little baby.’
I returned his smile. ‘You do? I still find it vaguely shocking.’
Rhys shook his head. ‘I don’t.’
I returned my attention to the contents of my freezer cabinet, grateful for the sudden waft of cool air against my heated cheeks.
If Rhys thought me talking to my fridge was peculiar, goodness only knows what he’d have thought if he’d been present at the cemetery the day after Henry’s shocking revelation.
But no one had been. I’d deliberately made sure I was at the gates the moment they were unlocked, knowing the conversation I was about to have was best held without an audience.
I walked with purpose towards her plot, my pace only slowing when I was close enough to read the inscription on her headstone.
‘Hello, Mum,’ I said. ‘Or would you prefer it if I called you Bee?’
A frantic fluttering from a nearby tree was followed by a pigeon’s hasty exit. I think it was the tone of my voice that had startled it. I don’t expect many people sound quite as pissed off as I did right then when they’re talking to the people they’ve lost.
I crouched down beside her marker. ‘You’ve got some explaining to do, young lady.’ That at least made me smile, because it was a phrase I’d heard innumerable times during my angry and rebellious teenage years, and it was kind of amusing to be flipping it back to its originator.
‘Trust you,’ I said with a sigh, ‘to make sure I’m still left guessing as to what you were thinking back then.’
A breeze whipped up from nowhere, ruffling my hair and brushing my cheek like a caress. I raised wondering fingers to the skin there and even looked skywards for a second.
‘Oh, so now you’re sorry, are you?’ I shook my head despairingly.
‘Honestly, Mum. How can a person be so sharp, so clued-up about practically everything and yet still have got it all so spectacularly wrong?’
There was a long silence, which I fractured with a broken laugh. ‘Okay, I guess that one could apply to either of us, now I think about it.’
I ran my fingers over her name etched in the granite.
‘So, you never liked being called Elizabeth? Who knew?’ My lips twisted into a smile. ‘Well, someone did, that’s for sure.’ I shook my head slowly. ‘He really loved you, Mum. He still does. I know Henry broke your heart, but he broke his own too when he left you.’
I lowered myself onto the grass so I was sitting on the dew-damp turf. ‘He did a really bad thing all those years ago, but he believed he was doing it for a good reason. You did a bad thing too, not telling him about me, or me about him, but I guess you had our best interests at heart.’
I stroked the icy-cool granite. ‘I wish you would at least have trusted me with the truth. Maybe when I first started asking about my father, I was too young to understand, but when I was older it would have helped to explain so much about why you were the way you were. Maybe we’d still have clashed the way we always have done – maybe that’s just the way you and I were made.
We always were like petrol and flames.’ I touched the red of my hair.
‘There’s a good reason why people like to call us fiery.
‘I could spend every day from now until forever being angry with Henry for what he did to you and for having withheld his identity from me for so long. But I think not knowing who he was has actually helped me to see more of the man you fell in love with all those years ago.’ A single tear ran down my cheek and plopped soundlessly into my lap.
‘I really hope you’ve been listening in on every conversation he and I have had here, because if you have, you’ll know for sure that you found the right man to spend your life with, the right man to be a father to your child.
It’s fate that’s to blame for taking him away from both of us.
‘Part of me likes to think that deep down you always knew he was the right one. And maybe you never stopped hoping that one day he’d come back to us.’
Another breeze whistled through the cemetery, and I stopped wondering if I was being fanciful. I just went with it.
‘I’ll take that as a yes, shall I, Mum?’
I leant closer to the slab of granite and ridiculously lowered my voice to a whisper.
‘I understand so much more now. You were hurting for years and years, and without the armour you pulled on every day you’d never have been able to get through life.
I understand how much pain you were in and how determined you were to protect me from ever experiencing anything like it.
Your methods might have been questionable, but I know you were just trying to make me strong enough to get through life without you. ’
More tears coursed down my cheeks. ‘I just wish now, when I finally know the truth, that I didn’t have to.’
I brushed the tears from my eyes, focusing my gaze on the golden lettering beneath her name.
‘I’m not angry anymore. I want you to know that. I spent too much of my life being furious with you; neither of us need for that to carry on in the afterlife as well.
‘Thank you, for being my mother and for always wanting the best for me. You did a good job.’ I leant in and gently kissed the chilled granite. ‘I love you, Mum.’
The trees beside me rustled. That’s how I knew she’d heard me.
Things were slowly slotting into place – they had been for weeks.
It was as though a puzzle I never thought I would figure out was finally about to be finished.
Mel was healthy and happy and positively blooming in pregnancy.
Jackson was about to marry the man he adored, and Henry and I were taking the first tentative steps in our new relationship as father and daughter.
I gave a satisfied sigh. And then there was Rhys.
Always Rhys. The summer was over, the lingering marks left by the lightning had almost faded into oblivion, and yet we were still together.
I kept waiting for one of us to point out we’d sailed straight past our expiration date . . . and yet neither of us did.
It had been a practically perfect evening. Later that somehow made it worse. It exacerbated my guilt, so heaven knows what it did to Rhys’s. When had things begun to go so tragically wrong?
Had it been when we’d been preparing our evening meal in my kitchen, enjoying the simple pleasure of doing so together?
The thought that the drama had been unfolding while I’d been standing at the worktop, wearing only Rhys’s t-shirt, while he found one more reason to brush up behind me, was like a spear to my conscience.
‘If I lose a finger chopping this carrot, you’re going to be one hundred per cent to blame,’ I said, arching my neck as he nipped gently at the place where it joined my shoulder, playing havoc with my ability to do anything except melt back against him.
The warmth of his bare chest against my back was tantalising, and I knew if I turned in his arms, it would only be minutes before his jeans and the borrowed t-shirt were tugged off again and we’d be stumbling back towards the bedroom, all thoughts of our dinner forgotten.
Had it happened even earlier, while we’d been making love, my half-packed suitcase pushed off the bed and abandoned as he tumbled me back onto the mattress?
‘We’re going to miss our flight,’ I told him as he unhooked my bra and lowered his head to my exposed breast.
‘Do you want me to stop?’ he asked, passion darkening the green in his eyes to a colour I’d never seen on any paint chart.
‘God, no,’ I murmured, my fingers already busy on the buckle of his jeans before rubbing my palm against the bulge that was straining against the denim.
I prayed it hadn’t been when he’d been inside me, driving me over the edge as I gasped out his name. It would be all kinds of wrong if that had been the moment when his daughter had begun struggling to breathe.
It had been Rhys’s idea for us to travel to Scotland three days before Jackson’s wedding, which was being held in a genuine castle straight out of the pages of a fairy tale.
‘If you can take time away from the agency, we could have a little mini break before the rest of the wedding party arrive,’ he suggested.
Old me would have balked at just two days away from the office, let alone five.
But she was a ghost who’d been properly exorcised.
Learning that a business could still be a success if it didn’t consume you 24-7 had been a revelation.
Or that you didn’t have to devote endless hours to social media to reach people, or that shutting the laptop and saying ‘Enough’ wasn’t a bad thing . . . it was actually really healthy.
‘I could do that,’ I said, surprising me almost as much as him with my reply. ‘Simon is scarily efficient and more than capable of holding the fort. I swear he’s better than me at practically everything.’
Rhys had given me a long, slow smile, the crooked one that I really loved. ‘Oh, I don’t know about that. You have skills Simon could never match.’