‘I thought your mum was going to lay into me,’ Rick said sombrely. ‘Especially when it became obvious that there was nothing they could do, and my parents had known for months. Your mum waswild.’
Kay winced. ‘She could be a difficult person,’ she explained to Ezz. ‘Hard to ignore but hard to get along with. Excellent at emotional blackmail.’
A rumble of thunder sounded in the distance. A flash of lightning lit the room.
Rick leant forward, as if to make certain that Ezz could hear him. ‘I wanted Kay to stay away from her parents. Her mum was domineering, and her dad didn’t try to intervene. They hadn’t earned her love, but she felt duty to them. Those months before we admitted we were married were lovely.’ He folded his arms, and then his legs. ‘It took her parents about five years to thaw enough towards me to be civil, but we never forgave each other.’
Ezz stared at him, fascinated by the colour of his eyes, so like her own.
He took out his phone, fiddled with it for a moment, then laid it on the desk facing Ezz. This time the image was the pin-sharp phone-camera display she was used to. Two women grinned out of the camera, both with mousy, wavy hair, one flowing and the other bobbed. They were curvy, wearing ribbed T-shirt dresses and flip-flops. The one with bobbed hair rested an arm affectionately on the shoulder of the other.
Rick’s voice seemed to come from a long way off. ‘Julia and Iona. They’re your sisters.’
She gazed into the screen, something rising like bile in her throat. Thea and Valentina were her sisters … notthese strangers. ‘You didn’t give them away then?’ she asked bluntly.
The awkward pause felt as if it could shatter, like glass. Kay stammered, ‘W-we were married by then. It wasn’t the same.’
Ezz sat back without touching the phone, which she imagined would be warm from Rick’s pocket. Her father.
Rick’s face crumpled. ‘When a child’s adopted, you can’t ask for them back. You were gone. You had a new name and a new family, but you weren’t forgotten. We always went out on your birthday, just us two, and we drank your health. And cried.’
Ezz sucked in air, and it felt like the first proper breath for ages. ‘And every year, on my birthday, I feel sad that it’s the anniversary of the worst day of someone’s life.’
Kay’s eyes widened. Passionately, she cried, ‘That wasn’t the worst day. The worst day was when they took you away!’ Tears had begun to ease from her eyes, and her top lip squared off as if she were fighting a sob. ‘No warning and hardly a goodbye. Just pills to stop my milk and an assurance that I’d have other kids. I was sent home the same day, and Mum told me to put it behind me.’
‘It?’ Ezz whispered, shaken by the sordid account. Valentina’s jokes about them being mistakes that had been swept under the carpet didn’t seem so funny now she knew it was true. She fought for composure, to quell her rising rage and think clearly about the present. ‘Why have you come looking for me now? If you got married in late 1983, that’s decades ago.’
Her sharp gaze caught an exchange of uneasy glances. ‘It was difficult,’ Kay muttered at last. ‘I was ill when Julia was born. My mum was the only one who could help. There was this “at last you’ve got it right” vibe.’
‘Where is your mother now?’ Ezz asked, already knowing what she’d hear.
‘She passed away,’ Kay whispered.
Outside, the wind flung fresh hail at the windows. Thunder rolled. Lightning flashed. Ezz usually loved storms, but this one seemed to be clamped around her head. ‘You couldn’t defy her to check I was OK?’ She looked between the two of them and pictured instead of their shocked and miserable countenances the warm, laughing faces of her parents Maxie and Vince Wynter. She fought for composure. ‘Your mum was right,’ she said to Kay. Words began tumbling from her. ‘I was never called a bastard. I was called “sweetheart” and “darling”, and I was loved every day until Mum and Dad died. They were wonderful people, who made music that made people dance.’
She lifted her voice over the rattling of hail. ‘All my memories are with Maxie and Vince and the wonderful sisters they gave me. You say you had no choice? No voice? Well, neither did I – just like you didn’t give me a choice about you disrupting my life today. I’ve lived without you, and you’ve lived without me, yet suddenly, decades after you married and began part two of your family, you want to crash in here to see me?’
Kay began to sob. Rick sat in stunned silence, gazing at Ezz. Maybe it was seeing those blue eyes, so similar to her own, that made her pause. With an effort, she softened her voice. ‘I didn’t know my birth name – Lindy Loveless.’ She didn’t point out the irony of the surname. ‘So how did you know my adoptive name? The TV show I watched about adoptions kept saying how hard it is for birth parents from my birth era to get that information. Did an agency get it? I thought they had to contact me first, and not just go blabbing my details to you.’
Rick rubbed his face. His voice was hoarse, as he was trying not to join Kay in tears. ‘Like Kay said, she had a social worker when she was pregnant and after. She accidentally left a piece of paper behind at Kay’s house once. Your adoptive name was on it. And like Kay said, recently we googled you.’
Ezz felt as if her forehead would split because her heart, unable to cope with the mass of emotions, was directing the overflow to her brain. ‘You’ve known my name sincethen?’ She jumped up. ‘I don’t even know why you’re here. I’m obviously still a dirty secret, a source of shame, or you wouldn’t have waited until my grandmother died to find me.’ Shaking, she drained the last of her water, having to fight to keep it down.
Kay’s tears eased from her eyes. ‘It’s not really that,’ she protested.
In the face of Kay’s distress, Ezz summoned her few remaining manners. ‘I’m sorry to be angry. It was human error that created me, human error that allowed you to know my adoptive name, human frailty that kept you away. But we’re strangers. You have your family and I have mine – the family that chose me. Lindy Loveless, she’s not me. I’m Ezzie Wynter. Do you …’ She drew in a long, strangled breath that hurt her throat. ‘Do you think you could leave?’
After a long silence, during which Ezz stared blindly from the window, they rose and left. She listened to their dragging footsteps.
It wasn’t until Ezz heard the front door close and turned back that she saw a white business card on her desk. In a no-nonsense blue font, it read:Rick Colville, general builder. The best around.Then there was a phone number, email, and a street address in Coventry, England. Scrawled hastily in a white space were the words:We were kids.
Ezzy began to cry in enormous coughing sobs.
After a few minutes Thea flew in through the door and flung her arms around her. ‘What?’ she demanded. ‘What is it? Oh, Ezz, whatisit?’
Ezz lost all control, clinging to her sister as she sobbed and gasped out the story of the birth parents who’d turned up out of the blue. Thea rocked and comforted and didn’t argue with what Ezz had done in sending those out-of-the-blue parents away.
That was what sisters did. They gave you unconditional love.
