“The surf was calling. I thought I was going to be the next worldchampion.” His laugh is wistful. “I left your mum behind, Joel. I always was a selfish bugger. And soon afterward she met Tom. Your dad.”
His honesty, at least, impresses me. “That’s it?”
“Pretty much,” he says, but like he wishes it weren’t.
“Would you have stayed if you’d known she was pregnant?”
He skirts the question. “I always told Olivia I didn’t want kids. I told her that life wasn’t for me. Maybe that’s why she decided not to tell me.”
Olivia. Olivia.A name I never hear. The sound of it travels back to me like music.
“You know, being with Tom really was the best outcome for your mum—and for you. What life could I have given you, living out of a camper-van, obsessed with chasing the perfect wave? I had no money, no possessions, no job... not a thing to my name.”
I think of my dad, those regimented office hours. His lifelong dedication to order and hard graft. Like a soldier reporting for duty, every day of his life.
“Was Mum pregnant with me when she met my dad?”
“Yes. She got a job at his firm, as I remember it. But they didn’t start dating straightaway.”
I stare up toward the headland. At the acrobatic herring gulls taking on the breeze. Dad’s lifelong hostility toward me is explained now, at least. I wasn’t an accounting anomaly, a miscalculation he could quickly fix. It was more like Warren had graffitied his name all over our house, forcing Dad to look at it every day of his life.
“Your mum was the easiest woman in the world to love,” Warren says now. “Everybody did. Not that she had any idea, of course.”
I think of Callie, and my heart fills.
“So, Doug and Tamsin... they’re only my half siblings?” I ask.
“Yes.”
Heat spreads through my chest as I picture Tamsin, what her face would do if she knew. We’ve always been so close.
“And Dad’s parents... aren’t my grandparents at all.” All thosehalf-term trips to Lincolnshire, where the welcome was always so warm. Did they know? Did a small part of them never suspect, when this dark-haired urchin turned up on their doorstep?
“I’m sorry,” Warren says quietly. “My parents—your biological grandparents—died years ago.”
We walk on, strides matching exactly. The Atlantic has become a furnace, the setting sun its red-hot core.
“What did Mum say to you when you turned up at the hospital?”
“She was happy to see me. We talked, and she asked for my number. It was sort of a funny moment, in the end.”
“I guess she forgot to give it to me,” I say, recalling how the palliative chemo had attacked her memory.
“I guess so,” he says, voice gruff.
I look at him. Feel the first fronds of anger take hold. “So why didn’t you ever try to get in touch? Mum diedtwenty-threeyears ago.”
He frowns, works his jaw. For a moment I think he’s trying to come up with an excuse. “Oh, wow. This is hard.”
My anger intensifies. “You’re telling me.”
“I did, Joel. I did try. More than once.”
My heart derails. “What?”
“The first time was a couple of years later. As soon as I’d got everything straight in my head, I contacted Tom. You were only fifteen then.”
Gusts of wind gallop by.
