I consider pushing him further.
Asking him again about that unnamed text he dismissed as nothing the other day.
Have you changed your mind?
But before I can, he leans down, kissing me, and it’s nice.
I don’t want to ruin it.
‘Go back to sleep,’ he says. ‘Make the most of having the weekend off.’
‘All right,’ I say, and let it go.
Still, as he heads into the bathroom, taking his phone with him, I’m left with a feeling of unease.
He never normally takes his phone into the bathroom.
He’s hiding something, I’m certain.
Keeping secrets too.
Chapter Eighteen
Idon’t plan to share my own secrets with Mum.
When I do finally get out of bed and head down to join her in the emptied dining room for a late Saturday breakfast, I go intending to continue keeping it all to myself, just like I did yesterday in A&E. I never entertained the possibility of confiding in any of the staff there. I figured anything medically relevant would show up on my CT (and admittedly it was a relief when nothing did), then, after that, I just wanted to convince my doctor to discharge me. She was very nice, extremely capable and efficient, but also overworked, getting pulled in about ten different directions, and at no point was I tempted to add to her load.
I am tempted to confide in Mum though. I trust her, she’s my mum, and I know she’d do anything in her power for me. But now that I’ve started to seriously contemplate leaning on her with this, I’m afraid, of so much. Like, how mad it will all sound to her. And, frightening her. And, being told I’m imagining everything, when I no longer believe I am. And, more than anything, of her trying to set me on a path to it all stopping.
I don’t want any of it to stop.
I’ve realised that since my fall.
I’m not ready for it to be over.
I need it too much.
And I think Iris needs me.
Because what if I did stop her from falling in 1943?
What else might I be able to change, foreveryone, if I can only work out what went so very wrong back then?
And I know, Iknow, how Mum will react if I admit to her that that’s something I’m considering, so I really don’tintendto tell her.
But she’s seen through me my whole life, and built an entire career on extracting reluctant truths from the most closed of closed-box teenagers, so, given I’m not even that closed a box, but at least a quarter open, it honestly doesn’t surprise me that, before the morning’s through, she’s got most of it out of me.
What she tells me in response though …
That surprises me a lot.
It becomes clear at breakfast, as she pours us both tea and fills me in on her evening, that she’s already pieced a fair amount together.
Enough, anyway, to insist I tell her more.
It turns out she didn’t only eat dinner with Felix last night. Ana joined them too.
Ana loves my mum, they’ve drunk a lot of champagne together over the years and have always hit it off. Felix isn’t as close to Mum, or Phil (‘It’s oddly challenging to look a young man in the eye,’ says Phil, ‘knowing he’s been watched by millions undressing my daughter.’), but they’ve crossed paths more than enough to be on decent conversational terms.
