‘Maybe it is.’
‘That’s my favourite bit of the story,’ Mel declared, reaching for one last tissue.
‘Please tell me I haven’t missed it.’ Steve barrelled through the door of the waiting room, scarlet-faced and sweating profusely. ‘I’ve just run the entire length of the high street after leaping from the bus like a stuntman.’
‘Don’t panic, Dad,’ assured a technician, who with perfect timing had appeared in the waiting room doorway to call us in.
‘Dad,’ Steve repeated in a kind of dazed wonder. ‘No one has ever called me that before.’
‘It’s kind of amazing, isn’t it?’ I said, catching Mel’s eye and almost tearing up myself.
‘Let’s go meet your godchild,’ she said with a Madonna-like smile.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
I closed the fridge door, pausing the way I did every single time to look at the ultrasound photograph held there with a pineapple-shaped fridge magnet.
‘Hello, little one, remember me? I’m your God-mummy,’ I said, kissing my fingertips and gently pressing them onto the sepia-coloured face in the photo. ‘We’re going to have such fun together, you and me.’
I startled guiltily at a sound from the doorway which had made me jump. I looked over my shoulder to find Rhys standing there, leaning against the doorframe with an expression on his face I’d never seen before.
‘Okay. I know. I’m officially crazy, talking to my fridge.’
He shook his head, a smile slowly covering his face like a sunrise.
‘Not at all. I love how much you already love that little baby.’
I returned his smile. ‘You do? I still find it vaguely shocking.’
Rhys shook his head. ‘I don’t.’
I returned my attention to the contents of my freezer cabinet, grateful for the sudden waft of cool air against my heated cheeks. If Rhys thought me talking to my fridge was peculiar, goodness onlyknows what he’d have thought if he’d been present at the cemetery the day after Henry’s shocking revelation.
But no one had been. I’d deliberately made sure I was at the gates the moment they were unlocked, knowing the conversation I was about to have was best held without an audience.
I walked with purpose towards her plot, my pace only slowing when I was close enough to read the inscription on her headstone.
‘Hello, Mum,’ I said. ‘Or would you prefer it if I called you Bee?’
A frantic fluttering from a nearby tree was followed by a pigeon’s hasty exit. I think it was the tone of my voice that had startled it. I don’t expect many people sound quite as pissed off as I did right then when they’re talking to the people they’ve lost.
I crouched down beside her marker. ‘You’ve got some explaining to do, young lady.’ That at least made me smile, because it was a phrase I’d heard innumerable times during my angry and rebellious teenage years, and it was kind of amusing to be flipping it back to its originator.
‘Trust you,’ I said with a sigh, ‘to make sure I’m still left guessing as to what you were thinking back then.’
A breeze whipped up from nowhere, ruffling my hair and brushing my cheek like a caress. I raised wondering fingers to the skin there and even looked skywards for a second.
‘Oh, so now you’re sorry, are you?’ I shook my head despairingly.
‘Honestly, Mum. How can a person be so sharp, so clued-up about practically everything and yet still have got it all so spectacularly wrong?’
There was a long silence, which I fractured with a broken laugh. ‘Okay, I guess that one could apply to either of us, now I think about it.’
I ran my fingers over her name etched in the granite.
‘So, you never liked being called Elizabeth? Who knew?’ My lips twisted into a smile. ‘Well, someone did, that’s for sure.’ Ishook my head slowly. ‘He really loved you, Mum. He still does. I know Henry broke your heart, but he broke his own too when he left you.’
I lowered myself onto the grass so I was sitting on the dew-damp turf. ‘He did a really bad thing all those years ago, but he believed he was doing it for a good reason. You did a bad thing too, not telling him about me, or me about him, but I guess you had our best interests at heart.’