“Not about my father. It’s your father I want to talk about.”
“Myfather?”
“Yes. You have questions. It’s a shame you had to get drunk before you could tell me how strongly you were feeling.”
Abby felt the colour woosh into her cheeks. “I never like to ask because I know it upsets you. You hate talking about the past.”
“It’s more that I see no point in it. What does it achieve apart from making you dwell on a time you’ve worked hard to forget?” Her mother stared out across the ocean. “But the real reason I didn’t tell you the detail is because I was protecting you. I didn’t want you growing up feeling the way I did. I didn’t want you growing up with all that baggage. Taking all that into your interactions with other people. Having it infect every aspect of your life, the way it infected mine.”
“I don’t understand. I can imagine it was very hard for you after he died. You were pregnant and alone—”
“Yes, it was hard after he died,” her mother said. “But it was even harder before he died.”
Abby waited, her heart thudding hard. She was consumed by a sense of foreboding. “Tell me.”
“You grew up knowing your father died before you were born, but what you didn’t know was that we weren’t together when he had the accident.” There was a long pause. “He’d left me. Us.”
She absorbed that. “You mean he walked out?” She felt her mother take her hand again.
“I met him when I was eighteen. I was young. I’d recently lost my own mother and I was derailed by grief. You probably can’t imagine that. You see me as calm and always in control, but it has taken many years of hard work to reach that point.”
She did see her mother that way. Until today she’d never been able to imagine any situation in which she’d feel out of control, but now she could. Today had shown her that her mother was as human as anyone else. And as vulnerable. It was a strange, slightly unsettling realisation. She’d seen her as a rock, but even rocks could be changed and reshaped by the world around them.
“Tell me what happened.”
“I’d been working at the hotel for years by then and I’d seen him around occasionally. Bryan. He owned the hotel. He was older, of course. Much older. Did that have something to do with the attraction?” She shrugged. “Maybe. Probably. He was a competent, successful man, or so I thought. When I was with him I didn’t think about the future, just the present. He was also attentive and kind and looked after me. It had been a long time since anyone had looked after me. Usually, I was the one doing the looking after. It was novel. It felt like a rest. I’m not making excuses. I’m telling you how it was.”
“Excuses?” Abby had to stop herself from asking a million questions. She knew she had to let her mother tell the story in her own way. “Why would you need to make excuses for your choices? You mean because of the age difference?”
Her father had left them.He’d left them.
“No, not that. Bryan was married. And before you ask, yes, he told me. He also told me they were separated, that the marriage was over. A lie as old as time, of course. Would it have made a difference if I’d known he was lying?” Her mother paused. “I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not. I enjoyed our time together and I’d learned by then that life was messy and complicated. I told myself it was okay to snatch a little happiness when it came my way. I didn’t see him as often as I would have liked. He was often travelling, but he came back to Cornwall whenever he could.”
“How old were you then?”
“I was nineteen. Our affair lasted eight months. Until the day I told him I was pregnant.”
That statement landed like a punch.
Abby swallowed. “I take it he wasn’t pleased.”
“That’s an understatement. He didn’t want me to be pregnant. He was furious. He thought I’d done it to trap him. Ihadn’t, as it happens. It was an accident, and one he was very much a part of.” She reached for Abby’s hand. “But I was thrilled. And he saw how thrilled I was and assumed I’d done it on purpose.”
“So he left because of me.”
“No.” Alexandra squeezed her hand tightly. “You were the excuse. He would have left anyway. He was that kind of man. But that assumption isexactlywhy I didn’t tell you. He was a different man from my father, but they did have one thing in common—they both shied away from responsibility. The degree to which he did that only emerged after he was killed.”
“It was a road accident? That part was true?”
“Yes. He was driving away from me. Upset, no doubt. Panicking. Afraid of what I might do.”
“What did he think you were going to do?”
“Tell his wife, I assume. I knew none of this at the time. I wasn’t his next of kin, so I wasn’t even informed of his death. It started as a rumour around the hotel. Then his wife turned up looking for me.”
“Oh no.”
“It came as a shock when she introduced herself.” Her mother gave a tired smile. “As you can imagine, it wasn’t the most comfortable encounter. It turned out he was more married than he’d claimed to be. His wife was as shocked to hear that they were supposedly estranged as I was to hear that they weren’t. It was an enlightening conversation.”
