It took a moment for her breathing to return to normal. Hate and fury, both emotions that rarely featured in her personality, had taken root on the day he left and they had grown branches that had wrapped around her and were now squeezing her ribcage.
She despised him. When he walked out, she’d thought she couldn’t hate him more. Now, looking at these images, she realised there was a whole pool of hate she hadn’t even dipped her toe in yet. Her mum, here without the man who had promised to love her in sickness and health. Him, away somewhere playing happy bloody families.
She didn’t want to believe it was true.
It wasn’t.
But if it was, then he’d spent a lifetime lying to her.
Now, for the cost of a seventy-quid ticket, she was going to find out.
This train was taking her to Glasgow, though she had absolutely no idea what she was going to do when she got there. Thanks to Facebook, and the fact that Stranger With The Same Surname – Lila Anderson – had no privacy settings on her account, she knew what company she worked for. She knew the bars she liked to drink in. It wasn’t much to go on, but maybe it was enough.
She always warned the kids that any weirdo could track them down through their social network posts if they disclosed too much information. Now she’d become the weirdo, following the clues, desperate to find out if her whole life had been a lie, if her father had been in a family-share situation that she’d been blissfully unaware of.
It felt so, so wrong.
She still had time to back out, to forget all of this and just go back to her life, her mother. She could get off at Perth, change tracks, get the first train home.
As if the universe was sensing her hesitation, her phone beeped, bringing the cavalry storming to her aid.
A text message from Todd. Her mum’s sister, Auntie Pearl’s son, so technically her cousin but the closest thing she had to a brother. Caro knew that everything she’d been through would have been even more devastating if he hadn’t been there to make her laugh and hold her when she cried. They were the same age, but while she’d chosen teaching, he’d gone into hairdressing, got engaged twice to beautiful women, then surprised everyone by falling in love with Jared, a Canadian colourist, at a styling convention. Five years later, they were still together. Jared was a lucky guy.
She read the text.
Are you on train? Have you lost the plot yet? Shall I arrange for Davina McCall to meet you to discuss long-lost father?
Smiling, she replied.
Yes. No. Tell Davina to be on standby.
She was doing this. No backing out. No turning around.
The next beep came a few seconds later.
Had to promise her my body, but she agreed to help. Will call you when coffee has restored power of speech. Love you.
Love you back.
She’d just put her phone down when the snack trolley stopped at her side. She bought two cups of tea and two mini packets of shortbread, pushing one towards her travel companion, accepting his thanks with a friendly, ‘You’re very welcome.’
Lovely girl, he thought again. The kind that any dad would be proud to call his daughter.
Lovely man, Caro thought. The kind that any daughter would be proud to call her dad.
The kind of manshewould be proud to call her dad.
Because Caro hadn’t had a father for a couple of years now – and she was terrifyingly aware that she might discover she’d never truly had one at all.
2
Cammy
He listened as the familiar chain of morning sounds permeated through from Lila’s dressing room to the bedroom. The patter of the shower. The buzz of the electric toothbrush. The gurgle of the coffee maker that she’d put there so she didn’t have to go the whole twenty feet to the kitchen to make her morning cuppa. The hum of the hairdryer. The ping of her straighteners. The clang as she dropped item after item of make-up on to the mirrored surface of the dressing table. The rustle of the clothes as she picked out an outfit. The thud as she pulled out a box of shoes and let it fall to the floor so she could step into them.
Cammy pushed himself up in bed, groaning inwardly as an ache spread across the back of his shoulders. He’d gone too hard in the gym last night. He’d got lost in thoughts of today before he realised he’d done ten extra reps on the bench press.
He reached over to the mirrored bedside table and grabbed the remote control. This was Lila’s place, bought and decorated before he’d met her, thus the over-excess of reflective surfaces. It wasn’t his thing. He owned a hipster gents’ menswear shop called CAMDEN, in the Merchant City area of Glasgow, and – much as most of his regular customers were great – working there exposed him to enough vanity, posing and borderline narcissism for any lifetime.
