Except that what had started as a romantic fling had ended with Sharon pregnant and with the father of her child being hauled off to prison. Realising the mistake she’d made by getting involved with Steven Austin in the first place, a man who’d vanished from her life without saying a word in order to return to a drug habit he couldn’t kick, Sharon understood she was better off without him.
Just as Courtney would do almost twenty-four years later, Sharon weighed the choice she’d have to make about her accidental pregnancy—and then decided to keep her child.
As a teenager, Courtney had listened to this story with dismay. The father she’d imagined inside her head bore no resemblance to the one Sharon described. It wasn’t easy to absorb her mother’s story or the explanation for why she was only now hearing it, even if she understood intellectually why Sharon would have chosen to keep the truth of her father’s wayward life from her for so long.
Sharon also admitted that when Steven was recalled to prison, she made the decision not to tell him about the pregnancy. He’d already begun vanishing from her life before he was arrested, and she’d seen a dark side to the man in the final days of their relationship that made her realise she wanted nothing more to do with him. Steven’s attempt to turn things around had clearly only lasted a brief time before he’d returned to the life he’d led before. If he hadn’t been sent back to prison, Sharon knew their relationship would have ended, anyway.
Which meant the last thing she intended to do was tell Steven she’d fallen pregnant with his child.
She never saw him again and never heard from him again, either. When he died in a car crash a few years later, and just a few short weeks after once again being released from yet another spell in prison, he’d known nothing about the daughter Sharon had given birth to.
It had taken the teenage Courtney time to adjust to this new understanding of who her father had been. Part of her wished she’d never asked and raged against the knowledge she now possessed.
But another part of her, the compassionate and loving part of her, couldn’t help but feel sorrow for her mother and the choice she’d had to make following the shock discovery of the sort of man Steven Austin truly was. A fun, brief romantic affair had turned sinister and sour as Steven’s true personality had begunto emerge—and then Sharon’s entire life had been turned upside down when she’d become pregnant.
Eight years on from that world-changing conversation with her mother, Courtney made the massive discovery that caused her to question whether Sharon had told her the entire truth about her father.
While clearing out the house they’d shared in preparation for vacating the only home she’d ever known, Courtney found an old folder of documents in amongst her mother’s things. At first glance, the folder appeared to contain nothing much of note; old employment paperwork, letters of reference, some benefits documents from years earlier, the sorts of things people keep hold of for a while just in case they are ever needed. Courtney was about to bin the lot when something fell out from amongst the musty paperwork and fluttered to the floor.
It was a newspaper clipping, a very old newspaper clipping, the paper thin and yellowing, the ink smudged. The image of the man’s face in the photograph on the clipping sent a puzzled frown across Courtney’s forehead even as she leaned down to pick the clipping up from the floor.
The man in the news clipping image looked just like her father.
As Sharon’s relationship with Steven Austin pre-dated smart phones and the easy capturing of digital photographs, she had few photos of the man in her possession. The only photographs Courtney had seen were a few shots taken on an old camera that belonged to Sharon, and which she’d had printed out. The candid shots showed Steven Austin grinning across the bar of the pub where Sharon had worked when they met, and sitting on the sofa in the tiny flat where Sharon lived at the time, smiling for the camera.
Between their short-lived affair and Steven being arrested and sent back to prison, it was a wonder Sharon had any photosat all. Even after she found out the truth about her father’s chaotic life and criminal record, Courtney still treasured those half-dozen photographs of the father she never knew.
The father who’d died in a car crash when she was just a toddler.
Or so she always believed.
The yellowed newspaper clipping Courtney picked up from the floor that day told a different story about the death of Steven Austin.
The headline in the Southampton newspaper read,‘Local man murdered in London street attack.’
With mounting dread and horror, Courtney read the brief story contained in the newspaper article. In clipped, crisp sentences, it recounted a brutal late-night incident in north-west London that left a man dead from multiple stab wounds. The victim was identified as Steven Austin, known to have lived briefly in the Southampton area after being released from prison for drug offences six weeks prior to his death. The article speculated that Mr Austin had relocated to the London area, and that police were pursuing various lines of inquiry as part of their investigation into his death, including the theory that he may have been acquainted with his attackers. Anyone with information was asked to contact the investigation team on a special hotline number.
Courtney read the article several times before the details started to sink in.
All her life, she thought her father had died in a car accident. According to this ancient news clipping, he’d instead beenmurdered. Stabbed to death on a dark street in London.
Murdered. The idea froze the blood in Courtney’s veins.
For a long, agonising moment, Courtney railed at her mother for keeping this information from her. Despite her grief at Sharon’s passing, despite the painful punch of loss she felt everymoment of every day, she suddenly felt nothing but hot anger that her mother had kept her in the dark.
Only once impotent fury passed and reason returned did she concede the very obvious explanation for why Sharon hadn’t told her the truth about her father’s death.
How could a mother ever tell her child that her father had been stabbed to death and left to die on the street in the dead of night? What sort of mother would inflict nightmares on her daughter by sharing information about such a traumatic demise?
It had taken years for Sharon to tell Courtney the truth about Steven’s drug habit, his time in prison, and the chaotic life he’d led. Courtney had had to drag even that much out of her. If Sharon had kept the awful and devastating news about Steven’s violent murder from her, then surely it was only to protect her?
Steven was long dead. Knowing the truth about his death—about his gruesome murder—wouldn’t change anything. Courtney remembered how she’d reacted after Sharon finally told her the truth about Steven’s drug use and criminality. It had crushed her to know who her father really was.
How much more would it have crushed her to learn the grim truth about his brutal death?
While these questions raced around Courtney’s head, she set the yellowed newspaper article to one side and shuffled the rest of the old paperwork back inside the folder in which she’d found it. Too shaken up to dispose of the pile of papers as she’d intended, she needed a minute to gather herself together.
As she stuffed the paperwork into the folder, her hands shaking, some sheets flew free and spilled onto the table top where she was working.
