Give me the summer. Wasn’t that exactly what Rhys had asked of me? The similarities between our two stories were astonishing.
And I was so lost in their love story now, I stopped wondering who the woman was that Henry was describing. I liked her spirit, her unstoppable enthusiasm to grasp happiness wherever you could.
‘Long before the summer was over, I knew I was going to break things off with Caroline as soon as she returned from her travels. She’d gone away for the summer, touring with a friend across Europe and beyond. No one had mobiles in those days, and even if we had, I owed it to Caroline to tell her face to face that I’d met someone else.’
‘You were going to choose Bee?’ Somehow it was easier to keep referring to her like that, rather than calling her Mum.
‘I was. Absolutely and emphatically. She was all I ever wanted. That’s as true now as it was then.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘At the end of the best summer of my life, I told your mother I was going back to Devon. I wanted to be there when Caroline got home and to break things off as kindly and gently as I could.’
I looked down and saw that his hands were clenched in his lap, the knuckles showing white through the thin skin.
‘There was an accident on the way back from the airport. Caroline’s taxi was hit by a huge lorry. Her friend died on impact.’ He swallowed several times before he was able to continue. ‘Caroline’s back was broken, along with virtually every bone in her lower body.’
Suddenly it wasn’t just Henry who was finding it difficult to swallow.
‘I spent that night and the next by her bedside, and we almost lost her three times. No one was certain if she was going to wake up. But she did. She squeezed my fingers that were wrapped aroundhers and opened her eyes, and the first words she said to me were: “Thank God you are here. I only came back for you.”
‘She was paralysed from the waist down, and we knew then that she would spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. How could I abandon her?’
There were tears streaming down his face and mine too. I was crying for a woman I never knew, and a man who’d been placed in an impossible situation, and lastly for another woman whose heart was going to get broken.
‘What did Bee say when you told her what had happened to Caroline?’ I asked.
I’d never seen anyone tortured by guilt the way Henry looked as he turned to me then in the peaceful rose garden.
‘I never told her.’
I knew my eyes were saucers of disbelief, but I couldn’t help it.
‘Why on earth not?’
Henry took his time answering, as though the words were scurrying creatures that kept getting away from him.
‘I made a judgement call. I wanted your mother to forget all about me, to go on with her life and meet someone new, and I foolishly believed the best and easiest way to achieve that was to tell her that I’d made a mistake; that Caroline was the person I wanted to spend my life with. I thought Bee would recover quicker and less painfully if I severed everything between us, and that hate would be an easier emotion for her to live with than love.’
‘You destroyed her with that,’ I said, fighting my mother’s corner because she no longer could and hadn’t been given the chance to when it could have changed everything.
‘I made a terrible mistake. I thought I was doing what was best for everyone. But it’s a decision I will regret until the day I die.’
I fell silent, my eyes unseeing as I tried to imagine the devastation of losing the man you loved, of feeling that you’d beenbetrayed by the person you trusted most in the world. Pieces of my mother, the parts I’d never really understood, were now beginning to make sense.
‘She must have been heartbroken. She’d been alone, and she’d been—’ The truth hurtled towards me out of nowhere, like a train I hadn’t seen approaching while I stood on the tracks.
‘When was this? What year did this happen?’ My words were like bullets fired from a gun.
And there it was on Henry’s face; the moment he had been steering this story towards. I didn’t need to hear the date. I already knew it.
‘Oh my God.’
He nodded slowly, a world of uncertainty in his eyes.
‘You’re my father, aren’t you?’
Chapter Thirty-Seven