‘Why exactly did you put it in there?’ Jessica asked.
I shook my head. ‘I didn’t. I mean, I don’t remember doing it. I’ve no idea how it got there.’
‘Well, it’s a great hiding place, Mum,’ my younger daughter teased, dancing across the kitchen to give me a quick squeeze. ‘And not weird. Not weird at all.’
I smiled weakly but couldn’t shake the feeling of unease that had crept over me.
‘We’re going to be late,’ Cassie predicted, pushing her sister towards the back door. She moved to follow her and then stopped and looked back at me over her shoulder. I was still standing by the worktop with my phone in my hand.
‘You probably dropped it in there by mistake when you were making our lunches,’ she suggested.
‘Yes, that’s probably it,’ I said. I didn’t sound convinced. It was a logical suggestion that anyone would agree with. Anyone, that is, who couldn’t remember finding a missing mobile phone at the back of a freezer ten years earlier.
I didn’t mention either incident to Nick. I swept them aside, as though by ignoring them I could somehow diminish their significance. But that wasn’t the end of it.
*
I never did get the results of the genetic test for FAD. That’s not strictly true: Ididget them; I just chose never to open them. They came through a week after Amelia’s funeral, and I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to deal with them then. Instead, I arranged to collect the results in a sealed envelope.
‘Iwillopen it,’ I told Nick, wondering if he was disappointed by my decision.
‘It’s up to you,’ he said. ‘It’s always been up to you.’
‘I think I wanted to know more forAmelia’ssake than mine. It was always more important to her than it was to me.’ Even then I was beginning to question again whether anyone should know what the future had in store for them.
‘Just remember, we’re here for you if or when you decide you’re ready to open it,’ the doctor told me when I collected the envelope.
But I never did. Ten years passed and although there were moments when I thought about retrieving the envelope from where I’d stored it, the closest I ever got to breaking the seal was when, two years after our wedding, Nick and I decided we wanted children.
We had two clear options: PGT, which would involve intensive IVF assistance, or adoption. Both choices were part of my family history, but it was my dad’s adoption story that swayed me in the end. I’d never known that he’d spent his entire life feeling that being abandoned and unwanted was something to be ashamed of, and I was desperate to set right that wrong.
Cassie and Jessica were matched with us when they were seven and five years old. On the night they first came home, Nick and I stood at their bedroom door watching as the two young sisters slept. We’d pushed their beds close together and they’d fallen asleep holding hands, which had brought back memories of Amelia and me. It also reminded me of something I thought I’d long since forgotten.
‘That last day on the beach with Amelia, do you remember what she said to us?’ I whispered to Nick in the shadows of our hallway. ‘She said she’d have loved to have met her nieces.’
It was too dark to see the scepticism in Nick’s eyes, but I was pretty sure it was there. I knew he’d be unable or unwilling to believe that Amelia had predicted we’d one day become parents to two little girls.
‘She made a lucky guess, that’s all,’ he said.
I smiled secretly in the darkness. Just because you love someone, it doesn’t mean you always have to agree with them.
*
The girls no longer shared a room, and after saying goodnight to Cassie I paused for a long moment at Jessica’s bedside. The memory of what had happened that afternoon was still horribly fresh in my mind.
‘I really am sorry about today,’ I said.
Jessica looked up from whatever video she was watching on her mobile.
‘It’s no biggie, Mum. You don’t have to keep apologising.’
I leant down and pushed back a few strands of strawberry-blonde hair that had fallen into her eyes. She was letting me off the hook far more readily than I was prepared to.
‘Well, I still feel bad about what happened.’
‘Bad enough to buy me a new phone?’ she asked hopefully.
I smiled. ‘No. But nice try, sweetheart.’
