Agitated, she started to scroll past the post when she noticed the first comment underneath, written by a complete stranger.
‘OMG, my dad will FREAK when he sees this. His fave band!’
Mine too, she’d thought.
Then she noticed the surname of the person who’d posted. Anderson.
Mine too, she’d thought again.
Coincidence. The same surname. Maybe that was why she’d clicked on the photo of the person who’d posted. She didn’t make a habit of snooping in other people’s lives, but any diversion from reality was welcome and she’d come to realise that in the many long hours she had to fill, curiosity was one way to pass the time.
Click.
This was pointless. Didn’t everyone have rigid privacy settings these days? Wasn’t that what she taught her primary seven kids at school? Privacy. Protection. Common sense.
Apparently not.
Caro saw immediately that the need for privacy had bypassed the gorgeous woman with the expensive blonde highlights and the gleaming white teeth, her head turned so she was looking over her shoulder, pouting at the camera, her slender figure wrapped in a gorgeous white dress, her feet in shoes with red soles.
Click.
Caro was scrolling down the stranger’s Facebook profile now, a vicarious spectator to her life.
Lila Anderson. In a relationship. Works at Radcal Pharmaceuticals. Went to Strathclyde University. A complete stranger, nothing to see here, time to move on… yet Caro couldn’t seem to stop looking at the images and words on the screen.
The stranger at the gym. In a restaurant. In New York, kissing a very handsome man she called her ‘Bae’. Caro knew from listening to the kids spouting today’s slang that ‘Bae’ meant ‘babe’ or ‘lover’. The stranger in a restaurant, with her arm around… her arm around…
Caro pinched two fingers together and then spread them to zoom in.
The stranger with her arm around a man that looked very familiar. Her eyes flicked to the status update at the top of the post. ‘This guy! Happy birthday to my amazing dad! Jack Anderson, you’ve spoiled me for twenty-nine years and now it’s my turn to spoil you. Love you so much!’
The sound of her mum’s laboured breaths beside her made Caro realise that she hadn’t exhaled for several seconds.
The resemblance was uncanny. Incredible. But of course, it wasn’t him. This girl lived in… She checked the tag – The Rogano, Glasgow. Yep, Glasgow. The city that her dad had been working in for decades. A tiny, but persistent, seed of suspicion began to take hold.
Her eyes went back to the man in the photo, the one who bore a startling likeness to the guy she called ‘Dad’ too. But it couldn’t be the same man. It was a ridiculous thought.
The facts and timescales didn’t add up at all. This Lila person said she was twenty-nine. Caro was thirty-two. There was no way her dad could have another daughter of almost the same age. As far as she knew her mum and dad had never had any separations and there had never been a hint of an affair. Surely there was no way something like that could have been covered up for 29 years?
And anyway, her dad’s birthday was… She scrolled back and looked at the date on the man’s birthday post and the power to exhale was temporarily suspended yet again. November 1st. Same birthday as her father. They’d rarely managed to celebrate it on the actual day because he was invariably away working in… Glasgow.
No breath.
Her gaze went to the cake. Fifty-four. Same age as her dad.
Click. Photographs. A lifetime’s worth. Retro pics of Girl With the Same Surname when she was five. Eight. Twelve. Sweet sixteen. Maybe 25. And countless others since then.
Loads of the early pics showed younger versions of the man who had been around when Caro was five, eight, twelve, sixteen, twenty-five. But not thirty. He’d left by then, a coupleof years ago, right after her mum was diagnosed. He didn’t come back.
He’d told her this was ‘his time’.
In all honesty, there had never been a time that wasn’t. Their lives had always orbited around his, fitted in with his schedule, sprang into action when he was around.
Click. Click. Click. This had to be him, but it couldn’t be. This made no sense at all. None. It had to be one of those surreal coincidences. Had to be.
She went through them all again, lifted the phone to call him and then stopped. No point. Last time she’d tried, she’d got an automated message saying his number was no longer in service.
It was probably just as well. What would she say? Hey Dad, why are you on someone else’s Facebook page? Why does someone else call you Dad? Where have you been going all these years? Where are you now? Why did you betray Mum, leave me, cut us off and walk out, you faithless, cold-hearted, arrogant, bastard?
