I was about to offer some surly protest about tea and treats not solving anything when Mads drilled me with a look.
“Stay there and I’ll bring your usual.” The order was subtle but pointed and I swallowed whatever I was about to say.
“Fine,” I grumbled, meeting his gaze with a churlish one of my own.
He smiled, then turned to Chloe. “What can I get you?”
“Tea, please,” she answered. “With milk. And I have one of those pod machine things if you want coffee.”
“Excellent.” Mads couldn’t have sounded more excited, and it was all I could do not to kick him in the shins. Before he left, he placed a kiss on my cheek and whispered, “Be nice or I’ll fuck you up.” Then he smiled and left the room.
CHAPTER EIGHT
NICK
I watchedMads leave the room, debating whether I wanted to smack him or fuck him. Both, ideally, but that would have to wait. In the meantime, his departure left an estranged mother and her son studying each other across a pretty suburban lounge in small-town New Zealand. Two seriously screwed-up people who’d survived more family horrors than most could imagine. Who had once been strong together, but who’d lost each other along the way.
“I hate that he won.” Chloe’s angry burst broke the uncomfortable silence. In response to my questioning frown, she added, “Your father. He won in the end. Or at least he achieved his goal. You were separated from me and kept under his thumb. And I was hurt in a way that was far more painful than anything else he could’ve done. What’s more, he’s still wielding that power from beyond the grave. Just look at us.”
Her words hit like a gut punch, and for a moment I couldn’t even think straight. All those years of therapy and I still hadn’t really seen it that way. For some stubborn reason, I’d always held my mother accountable for my pain. Maybe because shewas the easiest target, the one thing I hadn’t seen coming as a kid. But sitting in front of her now, I knew she was right.
My father had manipulated and controlled everything about our lives, and he was still doing it. That said, it was one thing to know it and quite another to change a worldview, years in the making. As hard as I tried, I struggled to shift the anger I felt for my mother over to my father, even though it had been his poisonous lies and machinations that had fed it.
She doesn’t love you. She never did. If she did, she would never have left you.
“Knowing that doesn’t make it any easier to change this.” I flicked a hand between us.
“No, it doesn’t.” She looked me in the eye. “And I can apologise till the cows come home, but nothing will change the fact I hurt you, badly. So I’ll keep apologising till the day I die and as often as you need to hear it.”
“You’re assuming there’s a future for us past today,” I reminded her bluntly and immediately regretted it.
She gave a sad shrug. “I’m assuming nothing. What I hope for is a very different thing. Can I show you something?”
A part of me wanted to say no just to hurt her, but I pulled on my big-boy pants and said, “Sure.”
She pointed to the wall of bookshelves. “Bottom shelf, far right, at the back, behind the Atlas, you’ll find an exercise book.”
I went to the bookcase and retrieved a bulging A4 journal. I set it on the coffee table and pushed it her way.
“You do it.” She pushed it back. “It might help. It might not.”
I studied her a moment, then picked up the journal and retrieved my glasses from my coat pocket. I held it in my hands almost fearfully, thinking I knew what it contained. And I was right.
It fell open on the photo of a young boy in his practice gear on a rugby field. A younger version of me. Maybe around nine yearsof age. Young and already cynical. All the secrets I was hiding from the world. The photograph caught me bracing against a tackle, my muscles corded, determination written in my glare.Bring it on, arsehole.I will fuck you up.Pretty much how I’d approached the world my entire life. A wave of compassion for that younger Nick caught me off guard, my throat thickening, bile churning in my belly.
I had no idea my father had taken those photos, let alone what he’d done with them. But I did remember how hard it was just to get out of bed those first couple of years after my mother left. How hard it was to make it to school. Rugby had been my only outlet. The only place I felt that I truly fitted. The one place I could release that anger I carried inside. A place I felt... valued. And it was largely down to my coach who saw something in me and didn’t just throw me off the team because of my bad attitude and the fights I couldn’t seem to stay away from.
I flipped through the pages and found more photos. Some from before Chloe left, some after. And not just photos. There were pages of handwritten notes, school newsletter cutouts, university articles, newspaper clippings, and so on. All carefully cut and pasted in place, dates and context added in that same flowery hand I recognised from her letter. A chronicle of my life.
Tears pricked my eyes as I scanned two pages dedicated to my wedding day with Davis. I traced a finger over his face, remembering the day like it was yesterday, feeling the love and sadness, but no longer devastated by how it all ended. I’d been given the miracle of a second chance and I couldn’t have been more excited. I had a future I’d never dreamed possible when Davis had died. Following the wedding pages, there were a few articles about Davis’s books and a report about his accident.
And then there was his death notice. That gave me pause.
Chloe had known I’d lost my husband. She’d followed all of it, right down to the final pages, which held news clippingsof Madigan’s kidnapping and our mission in Australia. She’d known the grief I must’ve felt, my father was dead by then, and yet she still hadn’t reached out.
“You two are quite the celebrities.”
I set my glasses beside me on the couch and looked up to find her smiling, like she was maybe expecting something from me. Gratitude? Relief that she had loved me and missed me enough to follow my life story? If that was her hope, I had nothing to offer, speechless and uncertain about what the fuck it all meant.
