“I know I’m not your son, Dad. I know about Warren.”
The color slides from his skin. He doesn’t say anything, or even move his mouth.
“Dad.” I lean across the table. “It’s okay. I know everything.”
The kitchen clock grinds on through the silence. Dad’s become a waxwork, too still to be real.
Eventually he speaks. “How?”
“Does it matter?”
He exhales heavily, which I take to mean no. “He didn’t treat your mother well, Joel.”
“I know.”
Dad’s eyes golf-ball. “Have you seen him?”
“Once. He lives in Cornwall.”
A tut. Like Warren’s some kind of philandering tax dodger and Cornwall is code for Bermuda.
“You should have told me, Dad. That he’d tried to get in touch.”
Dad frowns. “I panicked. I didn’t want him back in our lives. He had... no right to you. No right at all.”
Other than being my biological dad, you mean.“But you had no right to keep it from me, either.”
He sighs. Pinches his temples. I can see this conversation’s going to test his commitment to non-communication. “I suppose I thought you’d find out one day. I was probably just trying to delay the inevitable.”
I let the clock tick on. What can I say, really? I can’t forgive him this yet, but still I want to hear his side.
“Your mother did try to tell him she was pregnant, back then. But Warren said he was off traveling before she could get the words out.”
“So you stepped in.”
He exhales. “Not at first. She wouldn’t even agree to a date with me until your first birthday.” A thin smile. “That’s why you were always so close, I think. You had that time together, just the two of you, in that funny little bedsit of hers.”
I trace the outline of a heart onto the table with my index finger. I didalways have a special bond with Mum. She’d dance me in her arms around the living room, whisper me stories when my siblings had gone to bed. Confide in me like an old friend. I always assumed it was because I was her firstborn. But news of that year spent together, just the two of us, already feels like treasure to me. Something precious unearthed from freshly turned soil.
I sip my coffee. “So you went on a date and...?”
Still hesitant, he clears his throat. “She moved in soon afterward, fell pregnant with your brother. We got married, then Tamsin came along.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me? Before, I mean. When I was younger.”
“We always planned to. But after she died, I didn’t feel it was my place. I suppose that’s partly why I was so angry when Warren turned up. You have to understand, Joel—we’d built an entire life together by the time she passed. We’d never heard from Warren. I didn’twantto talk about any of that again.” He frowns. Fiddles with his glasses. “Maybe some of my choices weren’t perfect. But in the end, your mother and I were married for twelve years. We had three kids, a house, money, friends. And I believe—I truly believe—she was happy.”
Honestly? I believe it too.
“Look, maybe she didn’t love me in the... wild, crazy way she loved Warren. But when she had you kids—well, that was a different kind of wild, crazy love. A better kind. And Warren never wanted a family—that was one of the first things he told her when they met. He knew that much about himself, at least.”
I agree with Warren’s stance. But, luckily for me, I guess, he failed pretty spectacularly to stick to it.
“He knew what he’d lost, though.”
I nod. “Must be why he tried so hard to make contact.”
“No, long before that. After your mum got ill for the last time, I saw him leaving her ward at the hospital. He’d obviously had a few regrets.”
