The whole time he’d been grouting the bathroom in cottage number two, he’d been replaying the time he’d spent with Lili in London in his head, hoping to find some vital piece of information he could supply to PC Wilson, something that might make a positive ID possible. He’d come up blank.
It was so strange. He felt as if he’d known Lili inside and out, but it was only now he realised how little he’d knownabouther. At the time, things like surnames, addresses or what year they’d been born hadn’t seemed important. Those were mundane details they’d get to later. It was like those precious hours together had been a down payment on the time they’d both expected to have with each other – because he knew for a fact neither of them had intended for things to end there. Not for the first time, he lectured himself about how he’d messed things up between them, how he’d robbed the pair of them of the chance to find out what their relationship could become.
However, as he’d pressed grout in between the tiles, he’d realised he might havesomethingthat would help. He’d put a few things in the small attic above the kitchen when he’d first started travelling a lot and even more since he’d come back, waiting for his cottage to be ready.
Behind a couple of cardboard boxes filled with lampshades and other odds and ends, he spotted a large black frame. He pulled it from its hiding place, rested it on an old office chair with only one arm and stepped back to look at it.
This print was the twin to the one currently in his bedroom – well, Alice’s bedroom now. The arched Gothic windows were covered with climbing ivy, the sunlight dappling through the leaves of the trees beyond where stained-glass had once been, but down in the left-hand corner, staring into the sunlight, so it caught the edges of her hair and made it luminous, was a woman.
She was turned away from the camera, face mostly obscured. All that could be seen was the curve of her forehead and cheek, the jut of her chin. The similarity to the woman staying in his cottage was striking. It hadn’t just been his imagination working overtime. But it also wasn’t enough to know for sure.
He was just putting the framed print back in its resting place, when an alarm went off on his phone. Crap. Time to pick Willow up from school. He’d have to get back to that later.
Willow skipped across the school playground towards him, a book bag in one hand and a large piece of paper in the other. ‘Look, Daddy! I did a drawing!’ A couple of the other parents looked puzzled. Most paid no attention at all.
Ben scooped her up into his arms, and she planted a large wet kiss on his cheek as he strode across the playground, putting some distance between them and plentiful sets of listening ears. The grapevine in Invergarrig was always thriving, and its most fertile seedbed was right here at the school gates.
Willow jabbed a finger at her masterpiece. ‘That’s me and you and Auntie Nee-nee,’ she said proudly, pointing to differently coloured crayon scribbles.
‘So it is,’ he replied, although he wasn’t quite sure which scribble was him and which was his niece or aunt. Once they were out on the road, he set her down and let her walk beside him. Her warm little hand found his, making his heart clench.
‘Willow?’
‘Uh-huh?’
‘Do you remember what we said about you calling me “Daddy”?’
She looked away. ‘Not really …’
Hmm. He wasn’t so sure he believed that. ‘Willow?’ He stopped walking and turned to face her, waiting until she looked at him, which she did by keeping her head turned but swivelling her eyes in his direction. That one small act of defiance couched in obedience reminded him so much of her mother, that it pulled him up short.
He’d been letting himself get distracted, hadn’t he? He’d been so caught up with the appearance of Alice … Lili …whoever she was … that he’d forgotten the very reason he’d come back to Invergarrig in the first place.
Even if the woman staying in his cottage did turn out to be ‘the one that got away’, it would no more be possible to disappear into the sunset and claim a happily ever after with her than it had been five years ago. He was too busy trying to build that here in Invergarrig. For Willow, not himself.
‘Remember how we said I’m not your daddy, that I’m your Uncle Ben. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t love you?’
She sighed heavily, making her seem at least a decade older than she actually was, poor kid. ‘But you’rekindof like my daddy now Mummy isn’t here. You look after me, and we’re going to live in our cottage together …’ She looked back at him hopefully, and his heart developed a new crack to go with all the others she’d created in it. ‘I know. And I’m very proud and happy that I get to look after you, but you already have a daddy.’
She frowned, and her bottom lip protruded, then tugged his hand to signal they should start walking again. ‘But I don’t remember him.’
‘I know you don’t, sweetie, but Auntie Nee-nee and I are trying to find him because we think he should know that you’re living here.’ That was only half the story. Ben knew the name of Willow’s father, but there was no telling if the guy was alive or dead, or even if he knew of Willow’s existence.
All the books he’d read on parenting, being a foster parent or guardian to a child, maintained the importance of allowing the child access to her biological parents, if safe. He didn’t want to take that away from the guy – he had to give him a chance to step up when … if … they found him.Willow deserved that.
Willow chewed her lip. ‘Okay,’ she said, but Ben couldn’t help but notice there was no skip in her step all the rest of the way home.
Chapter Nineteen
Ten months before the wedding.
AFTER OUR FAMILY dinner, Mum batted away any offers of help in the clearing up from me, saying I should go and ‘entertain’ Justin in the living room while the rest of them did the washing-up and made a pot of tea. It felt strange, standing in my childhood home with him, a place he clearly didn’t fit into, but then I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror over the gas fireplace and I realised that, in my new dress, I looked more in keeping with him than I did my surroundings. I had a weird out-of-body sensation, as if I were straddling two worlds, fully part of neither, but ready to step from one into the other.
This is what finding yourself feels like,I told myself. Embrace it.
Justin walked over to the mantelpiece and inspected the photographs on top, and then a series of me and Lo in our school uniforms displayed on the wall. One photo on a side table seemed to catch his attention in particular. ‘Where was this taken?’ he asked, picking it up.
‘Oh, that’s Fran and Nigel and their family with ours – they used to live next door. Mum and Fran were so close they were practically like auntie and uncle to us.That was taken on a caravan holiday we all went on in Devon when I was … oh, about fifteen.’
