by Shari Low
The bed springs creaked as Aaron flopped back onto the mattress.
‘This isn’t how I imagined spending my wedding night,’ he mumbled, his eyes heavy.
‘I’m sorry, Aaron. I really am. You deserve better. I do too. Zac totally did a number on me.’
‘Fuck, yeah,’ he muttered. ‘Guess we both got blown off today. Sucks to be us, huh?’
That was the moment. Right there. After years of working behind bars, Celeste could see that he was in that space between drunk enough to lose his inhibitions and too drunk to do anything about it.
It was now or it was never. She made her choice.
‘Do you mind if I sleep here tonight? I really don’t want to walk back to my room on my own.’
Come on, baby. Come on. Say the right thing.
‘Sure,’ he shrugged, eyes even heavier now.
Celeste slipped down the straps of her bodycon dress and then shrugged her way out of it. She left just her tiny red thong on, then walked towards the bed, her high heels making tiny indentations on the carpet.
Aaron had rolled on to his side now, and as his eyes flicked open, he saw her in all her almost naked glory. ‘Celeste…?’ he murmured. There was a question in there that she didn’t answer with words.
Kicking her shoes off, she slid on to the bed, then reached over and flicked off the light, plunging the room into darkness.
He didn’t move and, for a second, Celeste didn’t know whether to admire him or feel offended. The number of rejections she’d received in her life while naked amounted to exactly zero.
Just to stack the odds, she gently ran her finger along the side of his face, then across his lips. Next, she trailed her nails down his chest with the lightest touch, eliciting a barely audible but reassuring gasp.
‘Don’t you think we deserve to feel good just for a little while today?’ she asked him, her lips touching his shoulder now.
‘Celeste, we can’t,’ he slurred. ‘Zac… Aggs…’
Oh, for crap’s sake. Even now, jilted at the fricking altar, drunk, and lying in bed with a naked woman who couldn’t give him more signals that she wanted to have sex with him if she wrote it on a neon sign and flashed it at him, he was still being decent. But that was the point, wasn’t it? If they had sex, she knew that tomorrow he’d be so racked with guilt that there would be no going back for him and Aggs. She was counting on it.
Still he didn’t move. The tipping point – had she misjudged it? Was he about to reject her? Or worse, had he fallen asleep while she was in mid-seduction?
‘She’s gone, Aaron, but I’m here. And I don’t want to feel like it sucks to be us anymore. I want to make you feel good again. We deserve that.’
All hope was almost lost and she was about to retreat and chalk it up to a bad idea that she’d have to permanently erase from her memory, when she felt his hand move towards her, cup her neck, and his lips touch hers. Without breaking their kiss, she pressed against him, her hands kneading his back.
‘Condom,’ he whispered, but she hushed him.
‘I’m on the pill.’ That wasn’t strictly true. But she didn’t have a condom with her and she wasn’t letting anything halt proceedings here in case he changed his mind. Stuff it. It would be fine. ‘Don’t worry.’
Those were the last words she said until it was over, a drunken shag that was fully executed, yet left them both barely satisfied. When it was done, they both lay on their backs in the darkness, until she heard his breathing change as he slipped into sleep.
Closing her eyes, she was almost asleep when she heard the sound of one mumbled word.
‘Agnetha.’
32
Hope
Hope had the strongest feeling that reality had just slapped her right across the face. The elation, the excitement, the absolute joy of meeting the man who’d provided half of her DNA had been shoved to one side to allow room for the mind-boggling shocker of finding a mother who was absolutely nothing like the one she’d hoped for.
There it was, laid out in front of her. She was the product of an illicit coupling between a drunk guy, in mourning for the girl he thought had jilted him at the altar, and a woman with a twisted agenda.
Well, hello, Mum and Dad. Don’t you just love playing happy families?
‘So what happened next? You just all went back to your own lives and never contacted each other again?’ Maisie was unable to hide the fact that she was absolutely riveted by all of this. Hope was grateful. Her sister was taking the pressure off her by asking all the questions that Hope wanted to but couldn’t quite articulate right now because she was still in a state of – as Maisie would put it – complete shockfuckery.
Agnetha was the first to reply. ‘It took me a couple of days to call because I went down with an almighty dose of food poisoning on the way home. I nearly ended up in the same hospital as my poor dad. But as soon as I was well enough, I called you. Loads of times,’ she said, staring at Aaron. ‘You never picked up. Then your number went dead and now I understand why.’ Hope thought he looked like he wanted to crawl under the nearest rock.
‘I couldn’t face speaking to you,’ he admitted. ‘I was devastated that you’d run out on me, but I was far more disgusted by what I’d done. I knew I’d blown it. I changed my number. Thought it was the best thing for both of us. I couldn’t face Zac either. A couple of weeks after we got back, he moved to New York to look after some actress full time and I let our relationship fritter away. I’ve no idea where he is now either. Damn, I’ve been such a coward and such a dick. I’m so sorry, Aggs. I know that means nothing now, but I really am.’
Hope felt a wave of sympathy as Agnetha put both hands to her face and tried to rub away the weariness that was there now. She seemed like a nice lady. A decent person. Hope was trying desperately not to make judgements, but she couldn’t deny an overwhelming feeling that this would all be so much simpler if it had turned out the way they’d anticipated and Agnetha was her mum.
Just as that thought formed in Hope’s mind, Agnetha let out a sigh that was loaded with decision. ‘You know what?’ she said, her hands going to the arms of her chair, ready to push herself up. ‘I think you all have a lot to talk about, so I’m going to go back and join my party and leave you to it. You’re very welcome to stay here for as long as you need. You’re also very welcome to come inside if you’re chilly. There’s plenty of food and booze, and God knows, we could probably do with a drink. So I’ll leave you for now. And Hope…’ As Hope met her gaze, Agnetha’s voice softened. ‘I think you’re very brave and it was so lovely to meet you. I… I wish things had worked out differently.’ Agnetha’s sad smile told Hope that she meant every word. ‘Please don’t leave without saying goodbye.’
‘I won’t. Thank you. And I’m sorry again for gatecrashing your party.’
‘Please don’t be,’ Agnetha said, leaning over and squeezing her hand.
As Agnetha stood up, Celeste’s husband got up too. She had to remind herself that he was also Agnetha’s ex-husband. This whole set-up was both incestuous and confusing – she still couldn’t believe that her mother had relationships with two men who had been involved with Agnetha first. What was that about?
‘I think I’ll join you for that drink,’ he said to Agnetha, and Hope noticed that he couldn’t even look at Celeste. No wonder. That must have been a tough story to listen to. Celeste hadn’t gone into intimate details about the night Hope was conceived, but they got the general gist of it and no guy wanted to hear that his wife had sex with his ex-wife’s first love out of some sense of twisted jealousy. And Hope guessed that he wouldn’t be happy about Celeste keeping her child a secret from him either. God, what a mess.
Aaron watched Agnetha go. The fury had left his eyes now and Hope saw the pain in his face as he spoke to her mother. Her mother. Celeste. It was going to take her a while to get her head round that.
‘Why didn’t you tell me, Celeste? I would have helped you. Supported you. We could have done
it all differently.’
Hope pulled her denim jacket around her, feeling suddenly cold. Aaron saw this and immediately took off his jacket and put it around her shoulders.
It gave Celeste… her mother… time to think about her answer. ‘So you could rescue me and we could make a go of it? Don’t be ridiculous.’
Wow, this woman definitely had edges. Maisie’s eyes were on stalks.
Celeste exhaled and dialled it back a notch, alternating her eye contact but mainly focusing on Hope. That was understandable. It was obvious there were a whole lot of complicated emotions flying around between Celeste and Aaron. ‘After I left LA, I came back to London and just went back to my life. I didn’t know that I was pregnant, didn’t realise until I was over four months gone. My cycle had never been regular so I hadn’t thought anything of it.’ She broke off there and spoke directly to Aaron. ‘I genuinely was on the pill, but I’d run out the week before because we’d extended our stay for so long.’
Hope was darkly fascinated by Celeste’s reactions. If the woman was embarrassed talking about such sensitive things, she definitely wasn’t showing it. She seemed almost brusque. Business-like.
‘Look, I know it seems like I was reckless with you but I didn’t think for a minute I could get pregnant so soon, I thought the pill would still be protecting me. I didn’t deliberately set out to get pregnant with your baby. I know that’s no consolation here, but I just wanted that to be clear.’
Aaron didn’t reply, so Celeste went on, her gaze now veering between Hope and the far distance, where her memories seemed to reside. ‘I’d landed a big job, an advertising campaign, and it was at the fittings that I realised I’d gained a bit of weight and then… Well, that was that. Job gone. I did a test and… well, I was devastated. I’m sorry, Hope.’
‘That’s okay,’ Hope replied, and then wondered why she was trying to console her. She should feel angry, furious, beyond hurt to hear that, yet instead she felt almost removed, like she was watching a movie and she wasn’t one of the leading roles.
‘Anyway… Christ, this gets worse and worse… The truth is, I wasn’t sure whose baby it was. It could have been Zac’s. Or yours,’ she was back with Aaron again. ‘Or one or two others from when I got back to London…’
Maisie turned to meet Hope’s eyes with a flabbergasted look that Hope immediately translated as, Holy shit, your mum was a bit of a slapper.
‘And I was too late to…’ She didn’t finish, but she didn’t have to – Hope knew exactly what she was going to say. She was too late to terminate the pregnancy.
Wow. That was a sobering thought. Hope only existed because her mother ran out of contraceptive pills and then didn’t realise her periods had stopped. And slept with her best friend’s boyfriend, and several other potential daddy candidates…
Something else occurred to Hope. ‘You said you lived in London? But I was born in Edinburgh, and adopted by a family in Glasgow.’
Celeste let out a bitter laugh. ‘Pure coincidence. I was working with an adoption agency in London, whose clients were all over the country. When they told me the parents who were going to adopt the baby were from Glasgow, I was initially apprehensive, but then I realised it didn’t matter. I’d stipulated a closed adoption. I didn’t want to give birth in London, where I might meet someone I knew, and I had the same problem with Glasgow, so I went to Edinburgh. Had you there. Handed you over. And then… please don’t think I’m a callous bitch, but I went back to living my life. I stayed down south for a few more years, before eventually coming home to Glasgow permanently.’
‘Did you think about keeping me?’ Hope’s throat tightened as she asked that.
Maisie heard it and reached over and took her hand.
Celeste shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Hope…’ That was the first time she’d used her name and it sounded strange. Her mother. Calling her by her name. If she’d thought this morning that this would happen today, she’d have been elated and yet now it just felt… wrong. In Hope’s mind, she saw her own mum, Dora, heard her calling her down for dinner, or in from the garden, and she recognised the affection in her mum’s voice. She had a sudden longing to be in her mum’s arms, to be telling her all about this, while feeling the protection and love Dora had given her unconditionally every day of her life. ‘… But I just didn’t have the capability to do that. I had no support system. My parents weren’t in the picture, I had to work to earn a living… The only people I had were Aggs and her parents, and they were dealing with her dad’s illness.’
‘Which made it all the more surprising that you screwed Agnetha over,’ Aaron said. His words were harsh, but his tone was one of pure defeat and Hope felt her heart go out to him too. He’d made a mistake. A huge one. But he’d paid for that by missing twenty years of her life and she knew he’d beat himself up about that until the end of time.
Celeste took the hit. ‘You’re right. But in my mind I saw it differently. Back then, I thought that keeping Aggs and you apart meant that she wouldn’t leave me. Flawed thinking, especially given how it all worked out.’
Hope cut into their exchange, unable to hold back the question that was burning a hole in her mind. ‘Did you ever think about me?’ She wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the answer. Celeste wasn’t exactly coming over as Mother Earth here.
‘Sometimes. But I knew that you’d gone to a good family and that you’d have a great life. Trust me, I’d have been a terrible mother. It’s something I never learned to do.’
Surprisingly, Hope felt a tug of sympathy. Had Celeste had a tough childhood? She made it sound like happy family life was a concept she wasn’t familiar with back then.
Well, she was about to find out if there was any chance that Celeste’s theory that she’d be a terrible mum was on point.
‘I think there are a couple of things you should know,’ Hope began, surprisingly sanguine in the face of the potential for a life threatening rejection. She went on to tell Celeste the same story she’d shared with Aaron earlier. Her cancer as a teenager. The recurrence a couple of years ago. The risk that it could come back. The need for stem cells if it did.
When she finished, Celeste was silent for a moment before seeking clarification. ‘Let me make sure I understand. You want me to get tested to see if I’m a match?’
‘Yes.’
Hope didn’t know Celeste well enough to decipher if the shadow that crossed her face was horror or concern. ‘Can I think about it?’
Aaron’s eyes widened, clearly shocked. ‘Celeste!’ he blurted.
Hope cut him off. ‘Of course you can,’ she answered calmly, aware that there was no other reply she could give. So Celeste hadn’t automatically and instinctively agreed to help her. Her biological mother would have to contemplate whether or not to step up if she was needed to save her daughter’s life. Of course, that reluctance was always a possibility, but in her childhood dreams, her mum would scoop her up, shower her with love and do anything for her. But there was no scooping. No love. Nothing.
As she was digesting that, Hope’s attention was diverted to a car that had just pulled up and parked behind Maisie’s Mini. A man climbed out of the driver’s seat, and a heartbeat later, the café door slammed open.
‘Will, you big darling! Where the hell have you been? It’s bloody midnight!’
Even given the tension of the moment, it was impossible not to smile at the gregarious welcome from a woman with a blonde bob and bright blue eyeshadow who was now standing in the doorway with her arms outstretched.
‘I’m going to come here every weekend from now on,’ Maisie said quietly but with wonder. ‘It’s like an alternate universe of drama and excitement just revolves around this café.’
Hope ignored her, too busy listening to the new arrival’s response. ‘Sorry, Val, I got held up. It’s a long story.’ He nodded a friendly acknowledgment as he passed their table.
‘Well, hurry up because your girl has been on pins and needles all night. I think she
thought you were standing her up…’
The burst of joy lifted Hope’s spirits a little. By the sound of it, at least someone was going to get a happy ending tonight.
‘… and you can’t do that to our Aggs on her birthday!’
This was obviously Agnetha’s boyfriend, then.
Hope saw two very distinct reactions. First of all, Celeste’s head whipped round, suddenly having a need to see the new arrival. And, at the other side of the table, Aaron’s eyes narrowed as he watched the man with undisguised interest and maybe something else. Sadness? Regret?
As the guy went inside, Hope watched as Aaron’s shoulders slumped just a little more.
Midnight – 8 a.m
33
Agnetha
‘Dad, do you know that Cruella is still sitting at a table outside? I was going to go out and do a nosy, but she gave me the death stare.’ Isla danced into the café kitchen and plonked another stack of dirty dishes down on the worktop.
Aggs, elbow deep in soapy water, glanced over at Mitchell, who continued to scrape leftover food off a platter, straight into the bin. She wished she had a camera. Over twenty years she’d known him, and this was the first time he’d ended up in a kitchen, helping her clear up at the end of a party.
Mitchell gave a casual shrug. ‘I know, sweetheart, but probably best to just leave them to it.’
‘Who is she talking to anyway? I don’t think I recognise them.’
Aggs jumped in to help out. ‘An old friend we knew a million years ago. I’ll tell you all about it later.’
‘Any more dishes out there, darling?’ Mitchell asked, before Isla could attempt to dig for more information. He was trying to play it cool, but Aggs could hear the tension in his words. Understandable. It had been quite a night.