Kim sits in the stands, watching Bella dribble the ball through a line of cones, then pass it to Jorie. Her chest is tight; the knowledge she holds is jammed in her throat, making her wheeze.
She drops Jorie back to Suze’s after soccer, then she takes Bella home. She orders Bella’s favourite pizza: ham and salami and mushrooms, double cheese, and she’s distracted enough that she forgets to request the meat be on half the pizza only.
Kim listens to Bella chatter about Jorie, and how she’s getting a kitten for her birthday. She removes the meat from her pizza and gives it to Bella, then only picks at a corner of the crust. Drinks a glass of water.
“Can Cami come around next week?” Bella scrunches up her napkin, pizza all finished. “I wish she lived closer.”
Cami. Her opening.
Kim thinks about leading Bella into the lounge, sitting with her on the couch, holding her hands, but decides against it. Informal, casual. Maybe that is the way to go. She swallows hard and wishes she’d written down what she wanted to say and memorised it.
“I want to talk with you,” she says.
Something in her voice must have alerted Bella, as her eyes widen. “Am I in trouble?”
“No darling. Anything but.” She takes a deep breath. “It’s about Dad.”
“Dad?” Bella’s voice cracks, then rises in a hopeful query. “Have they found him?”
Kim’s heart splits. “No. Hella-Bella, he’s not coming back.”
“You said that before.” Bella clutches her water glass with both hands, stares up at Kim with Chris’s eyes.
Kim moves her chair around the table so they’re closer. “Bella, the reason Dad didn’t come back to us is that he was in a car accident.”
Bella’s eyes are holes in her face, which is already crumbling in anticipation of bad news. “Is he… Is he…?” Her lip trembles.
“Come here.” Kim opens her arms, and Bella climbs onto her lap and burrows in. Kim will hold her until the end of time if it helps. “Daddy is dead. It was the last day we saw him. He left the flat and went down the street in his car, and a van was on the wrong side of the road. He was killed instantly.”
“Would it have hurt?” Bella asks in a tiny voice.
Kim closes her eyes, pain pulsing in her chest at the hurt she must inflict on her daughter. “Only for a tiny moment,” she lies. Chris had been alive when the ambos extracted him from the wreck. He’d died on the way to hospital.
Bella is silent, but her fingers tighten on Kim’s jumper, twisting the knobbly wool into knots. “Did you always know?” she asks. Her voice is thick, and she draws a hiccupping breathand looks up. Tears track down her face, mingling with the snot from her nose.
“No. I would—” Her breath catches. She can’t lie and say that she would have told Bella if she’d known, because shehadknown. “Not for a long time,” she says instead.
“Why didn’t the police tell us?” Bella asks.
And now it begins. No going back.
“Because Daddy—your daddy—had another name. And the other name was his real name. So the police didn’t know the person in the car was our Chris.”
“Why did he have another name?” Bella asks.
Kim reaches across and yanks out a couple of tissues and hands them to her. “You know how Daddy worked away a lot?” She waits for Bella’s nod. “I found out that he wasn’t away in South Australia as he told us. Your daddy, my Chris, had another family on the other side of Melbourne. He had a wife, and a little girl. So the police didn’t know to tell us, as they’d already told his wife.”
Bella freezes in her arms. “No. That’s a lie. He’smydaddy. Not anyone else’s. He told me I was his best little girl.”
He did. And now, with golden hindsight, Kim realises how clever he was with his words. What had been a joke is suddenly more sinister.
She wraps Bella tightly and speaks into her hair, her soft blonde hair, fine and straight. “I’m so sorry Hella-Bella, but your daddy is another little girl’s daddy, too. Daddies can have many kids, and they love them all equally.” That was so not true for everyone, but Kim was sure it was true for Chris. “I know Daddy loved you very much.”
Bella sniffles. “Why didn’t he tell us?”
“I don’t know. He should have done.”
The million-dollar question, the one she and Danika are skirting around.Why, why, why.
