Good. I don’t have to find this fucker’s address and order a hit on him.
“But when they found out,” Mia goes on, “he was arrested and convicted, he went to prison. The whole bit. I went to another family, but I were 17, and heading towards 18, so I was out, all the time.” She settles back into her seat, and strokes Tank’s head. “Then one day, this man with a camera around his neck and a strange accent approached me in Leeds. I thought he were some kind of weirdo, told him to sod off at first.” She laughs sadly. “Jan Amerman. World famous fashion photographer. He finally convinced me he was real enough, and then he took my picture, and when he showed me I thought, well wow, I look really nice.” She shrugs. “Three weeks later I turned 18 and I was on a train to London. The rest is history.”
“It is indeed.” I reach over to stroke the back of her hand briefly. “But your parents found you again.”
Mia’s nose wriggles as she sniffles, her gaze shifting from mine. “I wanted to look for them when Archie and I first got married. But it felt wrong. All those random private investigators, they all felt… scammy. Then a year later, my dad showed up. He’d tracked me down through my agency somehow, showed up outside one of my shoots.”
“How did that feel?” I ask her. “To see him again after all that time?”
Her eyes wander to the ceiling, and she sighs. “I think… I think I’d imagined it in my head so many times, you know? Like, that it would be some dramatic, loving reunion. Me running into his arms, him saying I was always his little girl, you know, Hallmark movie shit. But it weren’t nothing like that. It were just… sad. He looked so ill. His skin was grey. I always remember him being so… so lively, but now, he were just… flat.”
“Had he already been diagnosed with the, what did you call it? Korsakoff?”
Mia nods, fidgeting with her fingers in her lap. “Korsakoff Syndrome, yeah. He’d been diagnosed just a few months before. We sat in this pie shop, I still remember it had these bright blue tiles, and we sat there and he told me that he’d gotten this awful diagnosis, and that he only had maybe 8 years to live.”
“Fuckin’ hell.” I shake my head. “And your mum?”
Mia lifts her eyebrows, looking very much like she’s trying not to cry. “She’d died. A few weeks before Archie and me got married. She had a bleed on the brain, they don’t really know what caused it, or my dad had forgotten, I’m not sure. But she went into a coma, and never woke up.” Mia wraps her arms around herself again. “My dad, he was living in an assisted facility, a really dingy one, somewhere in Essex. But he needed better care, so I put him in Barnabus. They had a specialtydementia ward and told me he’d get the very best care.” She smiles sadly. “I told Archie, but he just said care homes made him feel sad and he never came with me. For a year, I went to see my dad, every Sunday and during the week if I could, after work or something.” She chews on her lip. “He deteriorated so fast. After three or four months he started forgetting who I was. By six months, he didn’t know at all. He’d be sitting at the window, and when I walked in he’d tell me he was waiting for Mia to come home from school so he could take her down the corner shop for a bag of sweets.”
I smile gently. “Did he do that a lot with you when you were a kid?”
Mia shakes her head. “Not once. But he insisted, he were waiting for me. And if I tried to tell him who I was, thatIwas Mia, he’d get angry. He started to get violent. I came in more than once to see him attacking a nurse, or being restrained. After 9 months, he had to be in the locked ward, because he kept trying to escape.” She huffs out a breath, her eyes shining and a pained smile on her face. “Hearing your dad screaming for you, saying, ‘But my baby’s alone in the dark, I have to go help her’, that… Oh, that does something to you.”
She puts her hands to her face, and for the first time, she starts to cry. I scoot closer to her, draping her legs over mine, and she leans into me, sobbing.
“I didn’t abandon him,” she gasps. “I just couldn’t take it anymore. It hurt too much. He didn’t know who I was.”
I stroke her hair with my fingertips. “None of that now. You did your best, love.”
“I just felt like I’d let him down.”
“No, no, you didn’t. You didn’t let him down. You didn’t abandon him.”
Her face tips up to look at me, damp and ruddy, her nose all red. “I called them, all the time for the next two years, askinghow he was. They told me he was just getting worse. Then I only called a few times a year, because the news was always the same. I called them last month, and they said the same thing, no change. If I’d known he was… he was going to die, I would have gone to see him. Even if he didn’t know me. At least I could have said goodbye.”
I tuck her hair behind her ear. “Of course you would have, but you couldn’t have known. You mustn’t blame yourself for that. It was a horrible, sad situation. And I don’t know what I think about God, or an afterlife or all of that, but I know when my mum died, I just believed she was in some happy place now, with her mum, and my brother and sister. That they were sitting around a kitchen table drinking espressos and having a laugh.” I give Mia a smile. “I like to think your dad’s somewhere like that too, laughing at a kitchen table with your mum, listening to the radio, and talking about you. How proud they are of you.”
Mia grasps my hand, pressing it to her cheek suddenly. “You think so?”
“Yes, I do.”
“That’s a lovely thought.” Her wounded eyes gaze up at me. “Thank you.”
“And you know what’s most amazing about it all?”
Mia shakes her head.
I smile, stroking the fingers of the hand she’s clutching to her along her cheek. “That you’ve come out of all of that, that you overcame it, and you’re this wonderful, funny, determined, clever woman. You never let all of that get you down.” I lean closer to her, and plant a kiss on her forehead. “You’re incredible, Mia.”
She sucks in a breath, and then we’re only inches away from each other. She gazes up at me, and her eyes are soft but lit from within, a look I know well. I know I’m looking at her the same way.
And alarm bells go off in my head.
What the fuck are you doing?
I back away from her, shuffling back down to the safety of my side of the couch before I do something genuinely thoughtless and fucking stupid.
“Did you want another tea?” I ask, picking up my cup.
