by Ali Mercer
His Secret Family
An absolutely gripping and emotional pageturner
Ali Mercer
Books by Ali Mercer
Lost Daughter
His Secret Family
Available in Audio
Lost Daughter (Available in the UK and US)
Contents
Foreword
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Lost Daughter
Hear More from Ali
Books by Ali Mercer
A Letter from Ali
Acknowledgements
For my mum
Foreword
Paula
When I was a child I had a book that told the myth of the Furies, the three terrifying goddesses of vengeance who pursued people who had done wrong. Once they were on your case, there was nothing you could do to placate them. They would haunt you and torment you without pity, because that was their job: they were there to inflict justice. To make sure that even hidden wrongdoing came at a cost. You could keep secrets from other people, or defend yourself against them. But there was no defence against the Furies.
I never would have imagined that one day I’d play the Fury myself.
But times change, don’t they? People change. And motherhood changes you. The Furies weren’t mothers. If they had been, they really would have been too horrifying to contemplate. Because if there’s one thing more insatiable than a goddess bent on vengeance, it’s a mother who is driven by the wrong that has been done to her child.
Anyway, I didn’t just decide to hunt him down out of the blue. I was provoked.
I’d done my best to leave him in peace. To move on. To forget, if not to forgive. I didn’t even think about him all that much. I was always busy, and anyway, he’d asked me to stay away and I’d chosen to honour that request. After what he and his wife and family had been through, it seemed the least I could do.
But then I found out – quite by chance – that his daughter was getting married.
It had to be the older one. The first one. By now, she’d be the right sort of age for all that. Mid-twenties. Heading into the baby-making years. Young-ish to settle down with the four-slice toaster and the his ’n’ hers TV trays, but not too young.
Marriage wasn’t something I saw in my own daughter’s future, but I was well past being bitter about that. Still, it struck me as odd that they’d chosen to stage the big day in my town, right under my nose.
It made me wonder how much they knew. The family he’d chosen. The wife. The girls.
Had they forgotten? Or had they decided it didn’t matter?
Maybe they had just assumed I wouldn’t find out. But I had. I had a friend who did bookings for the abbey hall where they were holding the reception, and she mentioned it to me. She recognised his name on the seating plan. And she knew he’d lived with us, once. A long time ago. Small-town memories are long – longer than the internet – and there’s no right to be forgotten.
She warned me so that I could stay away.
But I didn’t.
When it came to it, I couldn’t.
I didn’t make a conscious decision to do what I did. It was as much of a shock to me as everyone else. But we were in town that morning anyway, and the abbey hall drew me like a magnet.
It was a beautiful day for a wedding. Even a wedding you weren’t invited to, that you most definitely wouldn’t be welcome at. Daisy came with me quite willingly, and the sun beat down on us as we skirted the car park and turned down the narrow path that led to the abbey hall.
We went up the steps to the double glass doors. The reception was already in full swing; I could hear the hum of conversation. I pushed on through and held the door open for Daisy. She didn’t hesitate. We went through the lobby, past the sign displaying the seating plan, and came to rest in the dim space under the arch that led to the long medieval hall, the only surviving building of the abbey that had once dominated the town.
It was beautiful. There were flowers all along the middles of the long narrow tables. White roses. The air smelled sweet and heady and the thick old glass in the ancient windows dimmed the light streaming in from outside and made everything watery, as if the hall was at the bottom of a lake.
A spoon chimed against a champagne flute and the room fell silent.
Silent for him. There he was, at the head table, standing to give his speech.
Twelve years since I’d last seen him, ten since our divorce. He was older, yes – greyer, a bit more tired-looking, and he’d put glasses on to read the notes on the cue cards he was holding. But in spite of everything he looked fit and well.
He was handsome still. Dignified. Tailor-made to wear black tie. His wife was next to him, looking up at him adoringly, oblivious to us.
I didn’t care any more what he had suffered. I took Daisy by the hand and stepped forward out of the shadows.
He saw us. He opened his mouth to speak. Nothing came out. The champagne glass fell from his hand and smashed. But nobody looked at the shattered crystal. They were all staring at us.
He pressed his hand to his heart as if he’d been poisoned, then to his head. He sagged forward; his hands scrabbled for purchase among the shards of glass. He made a strange and terrible sound, the scream of someone who can’t breathe.
We all looked on in horror as he crashed down onto the ancient wooden floor, and it occurred to me that I might just have killed him.
One
Ellie
After everything she’d been though with Dad, Mum was in no mood to get involved with anybody. What she said was, ‘Men are terrible to live with – always leaving toenail clippings in the bath.’ I knew that when she said this she was thinking of Dad, and that the toenail clippings were a stand-in for other failings that were worse and made her reluctant to let him into our flat at all.
I couldn’t actually remember what it had been like when he lived with us, as he’d left when I was a baby. It seemed very odd that there had been a time when we’d shared a living space with him, toenail clippings and all, and though part of me was secretly very sad that he had gone, another part of me shared Mum’s relief.
Mum only joked about men and their annoying personal habits when she was in a good mood. At other times, she made it clear that what was wrong with men was serious. And every now and then she’d open up a little bit and I’d get a glimpse of what she was sheltering me from. One of those times was when she told me about her old schoolfriend Karen, a story which explained even better than the toenail clippings why we lived as we did.
Karen had two daughters who were about the same age as my big sister Ava and me, and like Mum, she was divorced. So far, so much like us. Except that Karen had got herself a boyfriend. And then, after a while, Karen found out that the boyfriend had been coming on to her older daughter, the one who was Ava’s age.
When Mum let this slip, her expression of disgust told me everything I needed to know: she wasn’t going to start seeing someone anytime soon. She resented it bitterly when people asked her about her love life. It annoyed her that they seemed to think she either ought to have a man in her life,
or want one. Sometimes she imitated them to us as if their presumptions were totally ridiculous: ‘Do you have a boyfriend? Are you seeing anybody yet? As if I’d have the time for that!’
And I was glad. I hated the idea of some weirdo coming into our lives who might make a pass at Ava, or even at me. Anyway, Mum really didn’t have the time. She worked long hours, she looked after the flat and she had us. A man would have been an intrusion, and would have taken up time and energy she didn’t have to spare.
A man would change things, and toenail clippings in the bath would be the least of it. He might not mean to, he might even not be a weirdo, but a man would take over.
Luckily, Mum was reliable. She wasn’t like Dad, who’d turn up three hours late if at all. When she said something, she meant it.
I thought we were safe. I took her at her word when she said there was no way, no way on Earth, that she’d ever get herself a boyfriend. She was on the shelf, and that was where she was planning to stay – for her own sake as much as for ours.
And then a huge bunch of red roses arrived for her. And after that, everything was different.
* * *
When the roses turned up, I was reading in the kitchen – Ava always turfed me out of our bedroom after school, so she could do her homework. Everything was always a big deal with Ava and her homework. This was because Ava was a swot, which was something I had decided not to be.
I read all the time, and grown-ups sometimes said that I talked like I’d swallowed a dictionary – I knew plenty of words, though I didn’t always know how to say them, which they always seemed to find funny. I was better at reading than talking, and unfortunately, my love of stories didn’t help me all that much in school. I wasn’t very good at following instructions or writing the kind of sentences my teachers wanted me to write. My reports always said I was easily distracted. I certainly wasn’t top of the class like Ava, and there didn’t seem to be much point in trying to be when she had got there long before me, and never showed any signs of slipping up.
She was going to be doing her GCSEs that summer and I was never allowed to forget it. I had tests coming up too, the standard tests everyone sat before leaving primary school, but they didn’t count for much as far as Ava was concerned. I got in masses of trouble if I woke her up when she was trying to have a lie-in, or did anything else that might run counter to her becoming a well-rested, fine-tuned exam-taking machine.
The doorbell rang, which was a pain because our buzzer wasn’t working and Mrs Elliott, the landlady, was being rubbish about getting it fixed. Ava came out of our bedroom into the hallway and yelled at me through the open kitchen door, ‘Can’t you go and get it?’
She couldn’t even be bothered to come and ask nicely. That was typical of Ava: her homework was so important that the extra seconds it would have taken to come right up to me and ask in a normal voice, or the extra minute it would have taken to go down to the front door herself, were out of the question.
‘Suppose so,’ I said.
Ava didn’t even say thank you; she just disappeared back into our room and slammed the door shut. I stuck my tongue out at her, grabbed my door key from the hook and set off downstairs, shutting the front door of the flat behind me. Mum was as paranoid about security as she was down on men, and it was fair to say that we’d had one or two dodgy neighbours in our time. I had been trained to do my bit to make sure it wasn’t easy for someone to walk in and rob us.
All I could see through the glass panes of the main entrance onto the street was the red of the roses. I opened up and the delivery man said, ‘Flowers for Mrs Harris, 25b?’
‘That’s my mum,’ I said.
Mum had kept her married name: she said she’d earned it, having survived her time with Dad. (He was usually ‘your father’, as if acknowledging his connection to us was the only way she could bear to talk about him.) Ava thought Mum should be Ms, but Mum said that sounded like a single woman who didn’t want people to know she was on her own. Ava said that wasn’t very feminist and she was always going to be a Ms and she was never going to change her name, and Mum said it was the world that wasn’t very feminist and Ava was too young to understand that but she would find out one day.
Both of these were arguments that were hard for Ava to beat. Mum always said that Ava was way cleverer than she was, but she wasn’t above reminding Ava that she was ahead when it came to worldly wisdom, and especially when it came to knowing about men.
‘It’s your mum’s lucky day, then,’ the man said, and held the bouquet out to me.
I took it. Those roses were amazing. They were just perfect: velvety and crimson. And there were so many of them! As far as I knew, nobody had ever sent my mother flowers before.
‘Someone’s keen,’ the man said.
He went off whistling to his van, and I went upstairs with Mum’s flowers. I felt like I was carrying something very serious and important, like a bride’s train or the corner of a coffin, as if people were watching me. I was so flummoxed by the whole thing I nearly forgot to shut the main entrance behind me… which could have meant that everybody in the whole building ended up getting robbed, not just us.
Ava came into the hallway at the same time I did. She said, ‘What the—’ and reached out to take the flowers from me.
‘I think I’d better take care of these,’ she said.
‘Yeah, well, if you’re so keen to take over, maybe you should have opened the door in the first place.’
I let her have them, though, and followed her into the kitchen. I’d learned that it was usually best to let Ava get what she wanted: a token protest was about as much as I could manage.
She laid the flowers down on the draining-board and got up on a chair to start looking in the top shelf of the big cupboard, where we kept things we didn’t need very often, for a vase.
Our cupboards didn’t have all that much in them, but they still weren’t very tidy. Once in a while, when she came round to do the three-monthly inspection, Mrs Elliott would have a moan at Mum about it. This kind of thing worried Ava – she was paranoid that we’d get booted out and then wouldn’t be able to find another flat we could afford near her school. But Mum said she kept the place clean and paid the rent on time, so Mrs Elliott could do a lot worse, and anyway, people like Mrs Elliott didn’t know what to do with themselves if they couldn’t find something to criticise.
There was a card attached to the flowers. I flipped it over: Ava still had her head in the cupboard. The message was brief and printed, so at first glance it looked impersonal. It said, To Jenny. Here’s to the future. Love, Mark.
Future? Love? Mark?
Ava turned and said, ‘You are a little snoop, aren’t you?’ and I dropped the card as if I’d been stung.
I said, ‘Well, don’t you want to know who they’re from? It’s not like this is something that happens every day.’
Ava brought down a vase and a jug from the cupboard and put them on the kitchen table.
‘Sometimes her clients send her things.’
‘No way,’ I said. ‘They’re definitely from an admirer.’
Over the years, Mum had brought back an odd assortment of gifts from grateful people whose hair she had cut. As well as the bottles of wine and boxes of chocolate, there had been more unusual offerings: a framed picture of children in a forest created by snipping holes in folded black paper, a miniature chest of drawers formed of matchboxes glued together, and, once, a full set of old encyclopaedias, which someone had given to us because Mum had told them how brainy Ava was. Ava hadn’t been in the least grateful and had pointed out that they were out of date and it was all online now and we didn’t have space for them anyway, and the encyclopaedias had ended up going to the charity shop.
Once someone had given Mum a primrose in a pot that had died the following week. But no one had ever, ever sent her red roses.
Ava had a quick look at the card too.
‘I think someone’s fallen in love with her,’ I said.<
br />
She turned and shot me a look that fell somewhere between You don’t know what you’re talking about and You might be right, and just at that moment she looked sly and lovely, with her big eyes and smooth cheeks and slightly unruly blonde hair. Like a girl who would be the main character in a film, while the other girls who didn’t quite match up had to be her friends or rivals or comic light relief.
Ava was really pretty, but when you lived with her all the time, you tended to forget about this and just notice whether she looked tired or whether her hair looked good that day or if she had a spot on her nose. But sometimes other people commented on it and then you remembered. And sometimes you just looked at her and the light hit her face in a certain way and you just had to admit it – it was a fact of life, like bananas growing on trees or the North Pole being cold.
In one way it wasn’t great for me, because I wasn’t especially pretty myself – my eyes were too small and my nose was too big and everything else about me was middling and nondescript. On the plus side, though, I saw an awful lot of her, and you might as well have someone good-looking around the place as not.
Ava said, ‘Someone’s definitely interested in her. That doesn’t mean it’s love. It could just be some creepy old guy with a fetish for hairdressers. Ellie, one of these days you’re going to wake up and realise the real world isn’t as sweet and innocent as you think it is.’ She started running water into the sink. ‘I’m going to put them in here for now. Mum can split them later. She might as well get the full effect first.’