Stef laughed again. ‘Oh, pardon me. Was that a secret?’
‘Why hadn’t you told me already?’ The disbelief became anger, sharp as a blade.
‘Because — because she’s—’ Honor was horrified to feel hot tears spilling from her eyes. ‘I was so disappointed. All my life, I’d thought that she’d love me like a proper mom and would have some fantastic, justifiable reason for leaving me when I was a baby.’ The tears tracked down her cheeks and her heart began to beat in huge great thuds. ‘But when I met Ru I began to realise that biology and maternal instinct are not the same. She lets Ru down in so many different ways.
‘And she’s yourstalkerfor goodness’ sakes!’ she finished, shakily. ‘That made it a little awkward.’
‘But you’ve known all the time that you’ve been living in Eastingdean?’
Honor opened her mouth but Stef beat her to it. ‘She’s known a hell of a lot longer than that.’
Martyn turned to him. ‘How?’
Stef shrugged, scuffing closer. ‘Years. It’s the kind of thing you can find out on the internet for fifty dollars. Every so often she’d talk about coming out here to meet her mom and I’d tell her what a bad idea it was, how they probably wouldn’t even like each other.’
Martyn was looking down at Honor as if he wasn’t liking what he saw. ‘Why didn’t you want me to know?’
She made herself confront the pain in his eyes. It was hard but she wanted him to see she wasn’t trying to hide anything, now. But she couldn’t prevent her voice from emerging tight with tears. ‘To begin with, I didn’t want anyone to know, incase it got back to her before I figured out what I wanted her to know. My dad warned me off ever searching her out. He said that I would be hurt, that Robina was nobody’s happy ending. He called her a flake. When I traced her and her son, Rufus, everyone was against me coming here and making her real. So I didn’t.
‘Then . . . I lost my job,’ she glanced at Stef, ‘and I had my severance money and I thought I’d come and do it anyway.’
‘It was a “fuck you”,’ stuck in Stef.
‘No, it wasn’t! It wasforme,’ she fired back. ‘I just pleased myself for once, OK?’ Shakily, she turned back to Martyn, forcing the tears back, wanting and not wanting to crumble, to fling herself into his arms. Good guys tended to console crying women. But if Martyn hadn’t read that memo and pushed her away . . .
With superhuman effort, she swallowed the sobs down. ‘It seemed possible and reasonable to come here and just get a look at Robina. At my mother.’ She had to swallow again. ‘To maybe get to know her and judge for myself. After all, the Robina my dad knew was no more than a kid. It was thirty years ago that she left me and I knew that she could have found me, but what if she hadn’t just because of all the same doubts I had? What if, when we met, we had gotten along?’ Her voice was wavering but she held her gaze steady. ‘So I came. I took a look at her. I found a way to get to know her a little. I planned that, afterwards, I would probably just go on home with my curiosity satisfied and pull my life back together and move on.’ She found herself clutching Martyn’s hand, willing him to understand. ‘All these years, all my attention had been focused on her and I didn’t think properly about Ru. He was the one with the real mom, right? He was the lucky one.
‘Turns out I was wrong about that. Turns out he could really use a hand from his big sister. And I felt something for him thatI really didn’t feel for his mother. Our mother. It complicated things! Should I tell him? Should I tell her? Could I tell one without the other? It seemed safer to tell no one, at least for a while.And,’ she went on because she couldn’t let him speak before she confessed the whole mess, ‘she knows about me and you. And she fired me. Which was unexpectedly painful.’
Slowly, he nodded. Computing but not commenting. Probably he saw his stalker getting a dose of reality as unimportant right now. Or he just thought that Honor had been served right. His eyes were unreadable. ‘Now I see why you didn’t want me to call you Freedom.’
Stef looked at him sharply. ‘My, you have gotten intimate, haven’t you? That’s something she doesn’t tell everyone.’
‘It seems as if there’s a lot she doesn’t tell everyone.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I was going to tell you about Robina.’
He sighed. ‘Maybe you were.’
‘I tried to talk to you about her just before you left and you said—’
‘I remember what I said. A nice easy out for you, wasn’t it?’
Chapter Thirty
Martyn’s SUV backed out of the drive like an angry badger. Honor felt an agonising pull as it gunned up the road and away, as if it were attached to her heart by a thread. She gazed at her husband, standing calmly, here on her patio in England, gazing back, tense but not letting his emotions take charge of his mouth. For once. His hair was short for the first time since high school. The smile lines bracketing his mouth had deepened into grooves, making him look uncompromising.
Anxiety slithered down her spine but she moved coolly past him, lowering herself on to one half of the lounger and gesturing to him to take the other.
He sat, without arguing. Also for once.
‘How did you know which yard to hang around in?’
That laugh again. It was beginning to make Honor wince. Stef used to laugh all day long — but it never used to be a bitter punctuation to his conversation. ‘Babe, this place is minute. All I had to do was buy myself a beer. I told some guys at the bar how I was in trouble because I’d come here to meet my wife and must have left the address on the train. And could anyone save my ass by telling me where an American woman called Honor was living? They sent me right along here.’
‘Right. And your release is scheduled for November 2ndbut you’re here on August 1st because . . . ?’
‘I made full restitution and one of the charges was reversed on appeal. Straight release with no conditions. I’m a free man.’ His smile was chill.
