‘I say all of this not as an excuse, Cozzie. I freely admit that the things I have done are not only wrong but harmful and quite possibly unforgivable. I say it because, after hiding so much of myself from you, I want you to know the truth. You deserve that. You have always sought truth out with a bravery I admire. I’m sorry it has taken me so long to recognise that.
‘If you can find it in your heart to do so, please forgive me. I love you so much, Cozzie.’
‘Daddy.’
She closes the laptop, finishes the beer, gets another from the fridge. She lets his words settle around her. She doesn’t forgive him but maybe she is a fraction closer to understanding him. And he doesn’t suspect her. He has no idea of the part Cosima has had to play in this unravelling and for this, she finds she is grateful.
So she does what Rudy told her to do. She calls her parents.
Her mother answers. Serena’s face fills the video screen. Her mother’s eyes are wet. Her hand is covering her mouth, as if she doesn’t trust herself to speak.
‘Oh my God, Cozzie,’ she says. ‘Cosima, my darling, oh my God. You called. It’s you.’
Serena is sitting at the kitchen table at Tipworth. Cosima recognises it immediately: the worn oak, pitted with indentations and tea stains and buttery fingerprints. The place where Hector carved his initials with a pen-knife. The corner Cosima hit her head against as a toddler. It’s all there, memories hewn into the wood.
‘It’s me,’ Cosima says.
For so long, she has imagined her mother being angry and cold with her. But Serena is neither.
‘I’m sorry,’ Serena says. ‘So, so sorry. For everything. We love you so much. We’ve been so worried about you and—’
In the background, a familiar voice saying, ‘Who’s that?’ And then Serena turns the phone screen around and Cosima sees her father walking through the kitchen door.
‘Cosima,’ her father says. ‘My girl.’
His face is older, more careworn. He is wearing a quarter-zip fleece, stray fluff around the collar, and his hair is whiter than it was when she last saw him, the grey fanning out beyond his temples into the upper reaches of his scalp. He looks smaller, more fragile.
‘Did you get my last email?’
She nods.
‘Thank you for reading it,’ he says.
Cosima watches as her mother puts her arm around his shoulders.The accordion of time stretches and contracts. She wants, suddenly, to be with them, in the yellow warmth of that kitchen, smelling the familiar smells of home – country air and hot toast and beeswax candles.
‘How are you, Dad?’ she says, her voice hoarse.
He tells her he’s ‘bearing up’. He’s waiting for a court date. His barrister says it could take a while. The average time to get to trial is over a year. After that, it might be a jail sentence but his lawyers are confident it won’t be too long and they’ll be able to get him out after a few months.
‘I could just get away with community service,’ Ben says, then catches himself. ‘Sorry. I don’t mean “get away with”. I know what I did was wrong, but …’ Through the phone screen she can see the light leaving his eyes. ‘Stupidly, I thought it was right at the time. I feel terrible that I’ve let you all down.’
‘You haven’t,’ Serena murmurs, but he ignores her.
‘You especially, Cozzie.’
He looks at her with a great, penetrating sadness and she wants to believe he means it. The exposure of her father’s vulnerability is disconcerting. She has never seen it before.
‘It’s OK,’ Cosima says, moving the conversation on. ‘Thanks for the donation, by the way. To the environmental charity.’
Her father shrugs.
‘You’ve made me think, you know. I should have done more when I could. Otherwise what’s the point of it all?’ Then he grins, some of his old bombast returning. ‘Still, I wish you hadn’t sprayed orange paint all over that nice sculpture.’
She smiles, relieved to catch glimpses of his old self showing through.
‘I let you down too,’ Cosima says and she thinks of River in the hospital bed and the police files and grabbing Martin’s wrist in the same kitchen her parents now sit in. ‘I’m sorry as well.’
‘You did nothing wrong,’ he insists. ‘I won’t have you thinking that.’
