“Is your mother home?” Anderson blusters on.
Bloody hell.I suck in a sharp breath and it catches awkwardly in my throat, causing me to cough. Anderson frowns at me. He’s always frowning. He’s never liked me, not from that first day we met at their house when Oliver and I were teenagers. Nobody was ever good enough for his son, especially not an anxious, introverted girl from a family of nobodies in Newcastle.
“Why are you here? What do you want with my mother?” Drew asks. There’s no trace of intimidation. Or of the grief Drew has just shown me, so acutely, in the other room. The measured way he’s rising to this confrontation astonishes me. It impresses me, given the crash course I’ve just received about their background. If I were him, this would be a shouting match by now—accusations of paternity flying.
“What’s going on with the two of you?” Anderson fires off, as if that is the worst problem we have as a trio. “Is Oliver here?”
“When did you last see my mother?” Drew steps toward him, into a moment of ice-cold silence charged by twenty-three years of rejection—much of it in plain sight. Sports sidelines. Prize-giving assemblies. Parent-teacher interviews, where they all must have brushed past each other like strangers. And I watch the dawning realization in Anderson’s increasingly panicked eyes the longer his son stares him down with the knowledge of all they have missed:Drew knows.
“Where is she, Andrew?” he says at last, a slight crack in his voice the only sign that he is rattled. “I haven’t got time for this.”
There isnolove here. None. Not in either direction. It’s all so dry and callous and fraught. Anderson glances back at me, as if he’s trying to piece me somewhere into this puzzle. Has Oliver not told him we’ve broken up? That would be entirely typical. He probably thinks it’s a temporary glitch.No need to inform the family.
“Mum is in the morgue,” Drew announces in a way that shocks even me, and I already knew the information. It’s not a word you throw into normal conversation.Morgue.It’s ugly. Cold.Is that even where they took her?
I shiver, and Drew’s arm comes around me. I’m instantly scared of Anderson’s reaction to the gesture, and Oliver’s response if he somehow finds out. Drew doesn’t take his eyes off Anderson and we watch all color drain from the man’s face, so much so that I’m worried he himself will drop dead on this doorstep.
“What do you mean?” His voice is different now. All the power bled out of it.
“I don’t know how many interpretations you need,” Drew replies. “She’s dead. I found her here, dead, this afternoon.”
Anderson reels back. Stumbles. He reaches for the doorframe to steady himself as decades of history play across his face. He is horrified. Devastated? I can’t quite pick the exact emotion.
“What happened?” he asks, at last. “Was it the cancer?”
Drew’s body stiffens again and he pulls me closer to his side, preparing to voice aloud for the first time the awful truth, in light of his mum’s note.
“No,” he answers simply. “It wasn’t.”
60
Drew
This note from Mum has me gutted. It’s flung me into a reality I can’t yet face or talk about.
I’ve seen her close to giving up on life too many times over the years to count. Part of me is racked with guilt that I didn’t see the email this morning and get here in time to intervene. Part of me is relieved that she’s succeeded, and her torture is over.
All of me puts the blame firmly at my father’s feet. I didn’t know he was back in her life, but showing up here tonight proves it. It explains the way she’s been acting.
Anderson trips backward down the garden path and into his BMW. He slams the door. Runs over the curb, flattening one of Mum’s flowerbeds as he screeches off. As he turns the corner at the end of the street and the roar of the engine fades, we gulp the silence, then retreat inside the house.
Evie and I stare at each other in the hallway.
“She had shriveled recently,” I tell her. “Not from the cancer or the treatment. Shriveled in her soul. It was as if she’d lost the strength to will herself through life.”
“Given up the battle with her past,” Evie says, as if she’s been inside Mum’s head.
I don’t want her empathizing this strongly with the idea.
“Mum’s life was so messed up, over so many years—largely because of that man—she couldn’t find a way to make it bearable.”
Thank God Evie has split up with Oliver.The pattern needs to break.
And I need to go through Mum’s emails and work out how myhorriblefather pushed her this far. He might not have driven the final nail, but I’ll bet he handed it to her. Why would he have turned up here on the day of her death, after avoiding her for years, if he wasn’t tormenting her in some new way?
Evie steps toward me wordlessly. She places her hands on either side of my head as if trying to calm my thoughts. Then on my chest, over my beating heart, like she’s trying to heal it as we stand here, in the wake of Mum’s life, grief swirling between us and around us like a spell, binding us together. “Drew, I’msosorry this is how it happened,” she whispers.
Death is complicated enough, even when it’s straightforward.
