“You’ve been asked to please wait for a car to come for you. You’re wanted at the house.” He said it as if he’d been forced to speak with a gun pointed at his head.
“Who wants me? What house?” Emmy replied, hardly able to comprehend what he was saying.
Mr. Bowker sighed heavily. “Mrs. Thorne wants to have a word with you. She’s sending a car.”
“His... mother?” Emmy said. A nervous mother cleaning up her son’s mistakes? Her grandmother?
He looked at Emmy as if she were daft. “Hiswife.”
The way he said it made her feel ugly and valueless. A pariah.
Emmy’s hand was still on the doorknob as she vacillated between leaving and staying.
“She wants a word,” Mr. Bowker said again, and it was obvious he’d been told to see that Emmy stayed and waited for the car to come for her.
“I’ve done nothing wrong,” she blurted.
The man’s hard features softened the tiniest bit. He had not been paid to look out for Emmy’s interests, clearly, but a sliver of compassion for her was now etched on his face.
“You said you had some questions,” Mr. Bowker said. “If you really want the answers, stay for the car. If you don’t, leave. I will tell her I couldn’t make you stay.”
Emmy wanted so much for someone to tell her what to do. She should have brought Charlotte with her. Itwas her damnable pride that made her tell Charlotte she didn’t need her. But Charlotte wasn’t there. There was only herself, the lawyer, and his tight-lipped secretary.
“Would you stay, if you were me?” Emmy finally asked, a challenge in her tone.
He shook his head, almost as if to shake away the entirety of all the messes people made when they let their desires run amok. “Honestly, I’d take the check and leave.”
Mrs. Thorne was not happy about this situation. That was clear.
“I never knew his name until you sent me that letter,” Emmy said, her throat thickening with childlike sadness.
“She never knew about you until she saw his will.”
It hurt Emmy to hear him say it that way. She felt at fault for having survived childbirth and taken her first breath.
But she was sure Mr. Bowker didn’t include himself among the unaware. He had known about her. He had drawn up the will.
“Why not?” Emmy asked.
“You seem a reasonably smart girl. I am sure you can guess.”
Emmy didn’t want to guess. She wanted the truth. She took her hand off the doorknob and let the door swish closed.
She took a seat in one of the chairs and smoothed her skirt.
“When did he die, Mr. Bowker?”
Emmy expected the man to say a year ago or six months ago or even on Remembrance Day, three months before.
She did not expect him to say that Henry Thorne had died on September 8, 1940, in the basement of the Sharington Crescent Hotel, his arms wrapped around her mother.
Thirty-one
ATfirst Emmy refused to believe that her mother and Henry Thorne had been together in that hotel. That was impossible. If that was true, then it was also true that on the night Emmy was conceived, he hadn’t been some passing teenage acquaintance that Mum had slept with after having had too many drinks. He wasn’t a person Mum had long put out of her mind as she had led Emmy to believe.
Mum had had a relationship with him. A continuous one. A secret one. Emmy now thought of Mum in those few minutes before she left Emmy at the flat, the last time Emmy saw her. She was going to Henry Thorne for help. She had said they needed someone with connections. Someone with money to help them find Julia. When Emmy had offered to do whatever Mum was willing to do to get what they needed, Mum had laughed ina sad, funny way because she was going to Henry Thorne for help.
Emmy’s father.
