“But—”
“You were all we ever wanted.” Martin took a deep, gasping breath. “We loved you…so…much.”
“Who was my birth mother?” Michael had asked, the words spilling out of him like water from a broken pipe.
In reply, his father sighed and closed his eyes. He never opened them again.
The next few months were the worst of Michael’s life. Navigating the shock and grief had been one thing, but doing that while trying to unpick the financial mess his father had left behind was quite another. Martin had done an extraordinary job of hiding his gambling addiction from his family, but once Michael peeled back the surface, he discovered debts everywhere he looked. With the fear of loan sharks quite literally turning up on his grieving ninety-one-year-old mother’s doorstep, Michael and Cynthia decided to sell their own house in Bristol and use the money to settle as many of his dad’s debts as they could. Cynthia had been furious at being uprooted from her home, and this had driven yet another wedge into their already crumbling marriage. But it was a price Michael felt he had to pay to honor the promise he’d made to his father. So, when Eve asked why he’d sold his house and moved in with her, Michael told her that he’d made some bad business decisions and lost all his money. When she tutted and told him he should have been more fiscally sensible, like his father, Michael had bitten his lip and stayed silent. And when he lay awake in bed at night, the wordadoptedswimming round his brain, Michael had tried to ignore it.
But, like an infection incubating in a body, over time the word grew stronger and more dangerous, until it became impossible to fight. Suddenly, little things began to make sense, like the fact Michael had green eyes when his parents’ were blue, or his affinity for math, when neither his mother nor father had the first clue about sums. These things had never bothered him before, but now Michael found himself consumed by them. So much so that one day, sixmonths after his father’s death, Michael sat down at the computer and searched for a local private investigator.
He hadn’t had high expectations when he went to meet Graham Pierce in his cramped, messy office. After all, he had no information to go on apart from the name of a long-dead vicar who his father had said was involved. But Graham had told him that this kind of thing was more common than you might expect; that in the fifties and sixties, lots of private adoptions were arranged through the church and that in many cases the adoptive parents’ details were put on the birth certificate, as had happened with Michael. The investigator hadn’t made any promises but had said he’d do his best to find Michael’s birth mother. After that, they’d agreed a price and Michael had returned to his own life.
He hadn’t heard anything for the next six weeks. And then one day in late June, as he was eating an egg mayonnaise sandwich in the back garden, an e-mail had popped into his inbox. Michael had opened the message and dropped his sandwich on the patio. Because not only was the private investigator claiming to have traced Michael’s birth mother, but the woman’s address was in St. Tredock, less than five miles from where he was sitting at that moment. His hands shook as he clicked on the attachment, and suddenly there were photos of a short, rotund woman with blue-tinted hair and green eyes.
His birth mother.
Phyllis Norma Hudson.
Chapter Thirty-One
Phyllis
Phyllis stared at Michael in mute shock.
This man was her son? She’d imagined him every day for the past sixty years: pictured what he might look like at six and sixteen. But at sixty? For some reason, she’d never allowed him to get that old in her head, and yet here he was, with gray hair and a beer belly. Phyllis searched his face for signs of herself but saw nothing apart from the eye color. And yet the chin…that chin belonged to Michael’s father, without a shadow of a doubt.
“I’m so sorry to spring this on you,” he said. “Believe me, I never meant for you to find out who I was. I know it must be a huge shock.”
“Is that why you came to the book club?” Arthur asked, and Phyllis jolted at his voice; she’d forgotten anyone else was here.
Michael nodded, but his answer was to Phyllis. “After Graham sent me your details, I didn’t do anything at first. It was all such a lot to take in. Within the space of a few months, I’d not only lost my dad and learned I was adopted, but also discovered who my birth mother was. But after a couple of weeks, curiosity got the better of me, so I drove over to St. Tredock and sat in my car outside your house untilI saw you come home. After that, I told myself I wouldn’t go again, that it was too dangerous in case you spotted me, but I found I couldn’t keep away. I started following you when you went out; not in a stalkerish way, I swear, but just to get a sense of who you were and what your life was like. And then one day, I followed you into the St. Tredock Community Center and Nova saw me and asked if I was there for the book club, and I panicked and said yes.”
Phyllis thought back to the first time she’d seen Michael at the book club; how he’d sat there silently, refusing to catch her eye. “Is that why you came to the meeting last week; to see me again?”
Michael nodded slowly. “That afternoon, my mum received a letter from their solicitor, telling her about Dad’s gambling debts. I have no idea why the solicitor did that, but Mum was understandably furious that I’d kept it a secret from her, and we had a huge fight. I was so upset, and I knew that if I stayed in the house, I might end up saying something about the secrets she’d kept frommemy whole life, so I ran upstairs and packed some things. I didn’t know where to go, just that I had to get away. But then I saw my copy ofWhere the Crawdads Singand realized you’d be at the book club that evening, and I suddenly wanted to see you again before I left…” He trailed off, staring at his feet.
“Why didn’t you tell me who you were?”
“I thought about it, once or twice. But I kept thinking that if you’d given me up for adoption, that meant you wanted nothing to do with me.”
Phyllis felt a lump in her throat so huge that it took her a moment to speak. “Did you really think I wouldn’t want to see you?”
In answer Michael just shrugged, and for a moment he looked not like a sixty-year-old man, but like a six-year-old boy, scared of being rejected once again.
Phyllis’s mouth was dry and she wished she hadn’t given her water away. When she spoke again, her voice was hoarse.
“I owe you an explanation.”
“You don’t owe me anything.”
“I do. After all this time, it’s the very least I can do.”
“Truthfully, you don’t have to. I—”
She raised her hand to silence him. “Please, Michael. You’ve told me your story, now let me tell you mine.”
—
