Jenny chewed on her lip. “Bad people have you on their radar. There’s no telling what they’d do to mess with you.”
“Right.” I stared at my coffee mug. The good feeling was fast evaporating. “As we’re waiting, you might as well, you know, run the images through that photo doctor thing?”
Jenny was already opening her laptop. She tapped a few buttons. “Is this his Facebook profile?” She showed me the screen.
“That’s it.”
“It’ll just take a few minutes.”
I was starting to feel a little sick.
Chapter Forty-Two
Haze
Bibi’s childhood had imaginary friends.Mine had an imaginary dad. Today for the first time, he’d be real. Flesh and bone. I thought I’d get through life never even knowing his name but today I’d be sitting down opposite him. It was long overdue and yet too soon.
It felt weird to dress up for this occasion, so I’d dressed down. Minimal makeup, and tracksuit bottoms and a hoodie. I was meeting Mike at Bridget’s Books. There was a downstairs café I’d been to a few times before where the tables were spaced quite far apart and it was always busy enough that no one could overhear neighboring conversations.
A private meeting in a public place. A blind date with my father.
I’d seen enough photos of him by now that I knew I could recognize him. Fuzzy gray hair and a beard. Looked nothing like me. I didn’t know what I really expected, but it wasn’t him.
It took awhile to find a parking space. I was going to be a little late, but what did a few more minutes matter at this point?
I tried to think about what I was going to ask him as I put my phone on flight mode. Whatever he had to say, I was going to listen. I wasn’t going to get distracted by an Instagram notification.
Growing up, I’d hated him. My mother had never told me anything about him, but somehow in my head I’d created him. Hewas a cold, unfeeling monster with a black mustache that he’d twirl. I could never remember which film baddie it was that I’d based him on. I’d picture my mother, her belly swollen with me, going to see him to tell him their happy news. He’d spit in her face, tell her he didn’t care, and laugh as she ran away crying.
When life wasn’t going your way, you tried to understand why. Blaming a person was easier—misfortunes happened due to someone else’s unpleasantness and poor character. Somehow, that was easier to accept than something as random and nonsensical as “bad luck.” You couldn’t lash out at “bad luck.” You couldn’t make “bad luck” pay.
Mike had said that he never knew about me. My mother had never told him. If that was true, then he wasn’t the bad guy that chose to abandon me. He was just a normal guy who was living his life, oblivious to everything I’d been going through. I couldn’t go barreling in there furious. We were both in the same position. We’d both been deprived of each other’s company. This was a meeting of equals, and of strangers. We would each be assessing the other.
I chewed on the inside of my cheek. What if he didn’t like me? Normally, parents met their kid when they were born and instinctively loved them. A parental bond arrived at birth. It was against the natural order to wait until the baby was a fully grown adult, then meet for a cappuccino and a croissant. I was finally meeting my dad, and the first five minutes would be small talk about how hard it was to find a parking space.
I knew from the Facebook photos that he liked fishing. Maybe I could google some fishing facts to drop in.
Fuck.
This was going to be awkward.
Hopefully, I’d find out he did know about me after all.
I was better at being angry.
I looked up at the Bridget’s Books sign. I was here. No backing out now.
A car was speeding down the road toward me, its hornbeepingrepeatedly. Fox’s car. He screeched to a halt alongside me. “Get in!”
I didn’t have time to think. I just did what he said. I jumped into the passenger seat, and he was setting off again before the door was even closed.
“What the hell is happening?” My heart was hammering.
“I messed up.” Fox’s voice was shaking as his hands gripped the wheel. “I wasn’t thorough enough. I let you down. I let myself down!” He shook his head and kept talking at high speed. “I was so caught up in all the rubbish I’ve had going on. I should’ve asked Jenny! But I was trying to prove we didn’t always need Jenny!”
He explained to me something about a fake photo doctor, about a back-to-front image, about extensive software to check for manipulated images. He said all kinds of technical things that neither of us understood. But the message was simple.
Mike Martin did not exist.
