‘You don’t know who I am, do ya?’
Cassie was startled. She looked up. Their eyes met properly for the first time. ‘Well, I’m not sure. I came because…well, you know why I came. I’m trying to find out anything I can about my birth mother.’ The woman didn’t say anything, she merely picked up her drink and took a long, loud swallow. Cassie pushed on, risking humiliation. ‘I thought it was maybe her that I was coming to meet.’
‘Did ya now?’ Her tone was mocking.
Cassie set her chin. She was determined not to be intimidated. ‘You know that. The texts, they were from you, weren’t they? It was you who called me.’
The woman seemed to think about whether to deny it, but didn’t. ‘Yeah, it was me.’
‘Why did you pretend to be my mother?’
‘I didn’t.’
‘Yes, you did.’ Cassie suddenly wasn’t so sure. Had she just assumed – hoped – that it was her mother? Had this woman actually said anything to claim that she was her birth mum?
‘No I fucking didn’t.’
Cassie felt a lot less brave. She checked Ryan was still there. He was: leaning against the bar, watching them closely. ‘I never said who I was. If you got the wrong end of the stick, that’s on you.’
‘But you sent me the picture?’
There was a long pause. Truth or denial. The woman chose truth, this time. ‘Yeah.’
‘How come you’ve got a picture of my mother and me?’ Cassie asked.
‘I’ve as much right to that picture as you ’ave. More.’ The defiance was hard and sharp.
Cassie felt confused, and frustrated. ‘Look, if you’ve got something to say to me, say it. If not, why did you come today?’
The woman held her gaze. ‘Becoz.’
‘Because what?’
‘Nothing. Just becoz.’
Cassie crossed her arms and waited, determined to tough it out.
The woman shuffled in her seat, then said, ‘I saw your post asking for info. It kinda shocked me. Seeing the picture. And seeing you. And it was like a weird coincidence. The timing. Cos they’d been in touch with me – about you.’
‘Who got in touch with you?’ Cassie asked.
‘Social Services.’ She said it in a weary, sour tone.
‘Oh.’ Cassie didn’t know what she was talking about.
‘It seemed…like now was maybe the time to…ya know.’
Cassie didn’t know. ‘I don’t understand what you mean. I don’t even know who you are.’
The woman pushed her drink across the table top. ‘You really don’t know?’ Her face was unreadable, blank. Cassie shook her head. The woman took a shallow breath and said, ‘I’m Leah. Your sister.’
Chapter 26
LEAH SAW the flinch and the recoil when she said ‘sister’. That stung, but she didn’t show it. She held her ground, and her silence, as the shock on Cassidie’s face was replaced, in rapid succession, by dismay, distress, confusion and disbelief. It was like watching waves running into each other on an incoming tide. It looked like an honest reaction, but Leah knew, all too well, that faces could lie. She pressed on the bruise that her announcement had inflicted, seeing if she could squeeze any more emotion out of Cassidie – true or false. ‘Ya really didn’t know?’ Cassidie shook her head. Leah pressed down harder, curious to discover how much damage she could inflict, and how quickly. She was pleased to see that it was a lot. ‘Are you saying they never told ya that you had a big sister?’
Cassidie shook her head again. Then suddenly her eyes widened and she shouted, ‘No!’
Leah jumped, twisted round in her seat and saw the boyfriend freeze, mid-stride, halfway across the pub. Cassidie flicked her hand at him, shooing him away. He made a ‘what the fuck’ gesture, but retreated back to the bar, as instructed. Leah was glad that Cassidie had dismissed him; she even admired her for a split second. Cassidie’s control over him was impressive. It also relieved Leah of the need to get rid of him. She’d recognised the boyfriend at the bus station, posing in his stupid cap and sunglasses, sticking out like a sore thumb. It was a complication, having him trail around after them like some sort of cut-rate PI, but not an insurmountable one. That Cassidie didn’t want him close to the action was interesting.
‘You all right?’ Leah asked, not caring really.
‘Yeah, sorry.’
Leah watched the ripples of Cassidie’s confusion and felt an unfamiliar, but very welcome sense of calm. Her moment in the spotlight had finally arrived. She sat with her drink, waiting, perfectly content. There was no rush. There was no bitch-sister around to steal her limelight this time. Only when she felt the time was right – and that Cassidie was ready to concentrate – did she reach for her evidence. She pulled her bag onto her lap, rummaged through it and found the grubby, dog-eared envelope. She lifted the flap, took out the photo and placed it on the table.
Ta-dah!
Cassidie blinked and blinked again, then slowly reached for her bag, took out her copy of the photo and slid it across the table. Lined up, side-by-side, the two were identical.
‘It was in your family pack as well,’ Leah said. Cassidie nodded and stared in disbelief. ‘I’m guessing they didn’t show you this one, though, did they?’ Leah reached inside the envelope and pulled out her coup de grâce. She held it to her chest for a second, savouring the moment, before laying it down on the table. The photo was of the same woman with the same baby on her knee, the same ugly mirror was behind their heads, but in this shot there was another child – a thin little girl with a pale face and straight brown hair, leaning in against her mother’s side.
‘You?’ Cassidie whispered.
‘Yeah. And you. And our mum.’ Leah’s voice was bleached of emotion.
‘I don’t understand.’ Cassidie looked at the photo, then back up at Leah.
Leah shrugged, as if it was neither here nor there. ‘What? What don’t you understand?’
‘How I can have a sister that no one told me about?’
Again Leah sniffed for bullshit, but couldn’t detect any. ‘Because they lie…when it suits ’em.’
‘Not my mum and dad.’ She was too wrapped up in her own emotions to see Leah stiffen. ‘Why would they lie about something as huge as this?’
‘Cos they wanted to keep us apart. They still do.’
‘But why?’
Leah watched Cassidie grasping for the truth…and deciding – despite the evidence Leah was putting in front of her – that she still believed her lying, bastard parents. Doubt clouded Cassidie’s eyes and she drew herself back from the table, putting physical distance between the two of them. The stuck-up bitch. Leah’s sense of calm evaporated. A cold, deep rage flooded through her and she reacted honestly, without control. ‘Cos they wanted you, but not me.’
Chapter 27
TOM HADN’T meant to spy on them, he just happened to be on the upstairs landing, changing a light bulb, when he heard Ryan’s car pull up outside. It was the unnecessary tyre squeal that alerted him. The cars were nose-to-tail along their street, as Alyson and Dan, their next-door neighbours, were hosting her mum’s sixtieth birthday party. They had warned everyone – well in advance. There was only one fairly tight space free. Pettiness made Tom hope that when Ryan tried to reverse into it, he did it badly. He didn’t, of course. He swung the Golf in backwards deftly, at a crazily acute angle, and parked perfectly, first time. Cocky little bastard. Tom climbed down from the stepladder and, with naked curiosity, watched to see what would happen next. It was a bright, sunny Saturday afternoon and people were out and about. Chris, from across the street, was washing his car on his drive, not ten feet away from them. Surely they wouldn’t… but evidently they would.
As the minutes ticked by, Tom was sorely tempted to rush outside on some fabricated errand and catch them at it. He didn’t, of course, but only because he couldn’t bring himself to face the embarrassment of having to haul his seventeen-year-old daughter out of some boy-racer’s car in broad d
aylight. Five, ten minutes passed. It was a long time to spend imagining his daughter being pawed by a greasy ferret of a lad.
Eventually there was some movement. The driver’s door opened and Ryan climbed out. What happened next shocked Tom.
Ryan walked round the car and opened the passenger door. Then, in an act of chivalry that was quaintly old-fashioned, he bent down and extended his hand into the vehicle to help Cassie out. She emerged, slowly, like a princess from a fairy-tale carriage. But that wasn’t the end of their courtly dance. They stood toe-to-toe, on the pavement, their faces only a few centimetres apart, seemingly oblivious to the slow hum of suburbia surrounding them. Tom watched, horribly fascinated, as Ryan lifted his hand and gently stroked Cassie’s cheek. For what felt like an eternity she leant into his touch, covering his fingers with her own. The tenderness of the gesture was evident. In that moment Tom felt, not anger, but surprise and an uneasy jealousy.
Ryan’s protectiveness seemed to contrast starkly with his own recent failure to approach Cassie with anything other than ineffective words and conflicting emotions. When he’d discovered her asleep and distressed in her room the previous weekend, Tom had felt powerless, no longer certain of his rights or his role in physically comforting his own daughter. It was like a dark echo of the early days of her adoption. He’d remained silent in the doorway of her bedroom for a few moments, bizarrely worried that he was going to wake her, which would surely have been a good thing, given that she was obviously having a bad dream. He’d listened to her snuffly whimpering, horrified but also transfixed. He so rarely saw his ebullient, confident daughter vulnerable these days. Then the bloody dog had appeared from nowhere and launched itself across the room and onto the bed; so much for waking Cassie calmly and gently.
Though it was obviously a bit of a shock, Cassie’s reaction had been extreme. It was as if she’d been attacked. She started awake and sat bolt upright, scrambling away from the dog – and from him – shouting hysterically. He’d tried to reassure her as he’d dragged Elmo away and shut him out of the room. Tom then went over to her and knelt beside the bed, his arms outstretched. ‘Whoa! Sorry. It’s okay, love. It was only Elmo getting over-excited. You were dreaming. A bad one, by the sound of it. It’s over now. Cassie. Honey. It’s okay.’
But she wasn’t listening. She edged further away and looked at him with real fear in her eyes. It was awful, and horribly familiar. After a few truly frightening minutes of panic, she glanced beyond him at the room with all its familiar things; this seemed to root her back in the present, because her distress finally ebbed away. It was replaced by something much calmer, but still very guarded. She rubbed her hand across her mouth and cheeks, as if wiping away cobwebs. ‘What time is it?’ Her voice was raspy and unsteady.
‘I’m not sure. About half-four, I think.’ Cassie reached for her phone and checked, leaving Tom kneeling awkwardly beside the bed, wanting to comfort her but not knowing how. ‘Are you okay? You sounded upset, even before the bloody dog.’
Cassie moved so that she could swing her legs off the bed, making him shift out of her way. ‘Yeah. Just a weird dream.’ She stood up. ‘Do you mind, Dad? I need to go and have a shower.’ And with that, she dismissed him.
Tom got awkwardly to his feet and walked out of her room, carrying with him the uncomfortable sensation that their relationship had slipped back to its shaky beginnings.
The first time it happened was the day that Tom repaired the fence.
Grace and – a two weeks with us, settled amazingly well, can’t believe she’s ours – Cassie were in the house, playing. Tom had reluctantly left them to it. A panel had blown out in the back garden, and Jean, their nice-enough but fussy next-door neighbour, was stressing about the wind damage to her plants and the increased likelihood of intruders. It was the last thing Tom wanted to do on the final weekend of his parental leave, but he knew, from past experience, that Jean’s softly spoken but persistent comments wouldn’t stop until the fence was sorted. It turned into a real pain of a job. To add insult to injury, it started to rain heavily as Tom was trying to wrestle the new panel into place between the warped posts. He pulled the hood of his sweatshirt up and carried on working, wishing that his DIY skills and the weather were better. After a half-hour of hammering, bashing and cursing, the fence was finally fixed, at least until the next blustery day. Tom packed up his tools and headed back to his natural milieu, a warm house with a coffee, where there was little or no risk of digit loss.
The girls had decamped into the kitchen. He could see Cassie sitting on the floor, playing. Grace was talking to her as she moved around, getting things out of the cupboards ready for lunch. Tom eased off his muddy trainers, pushed open the door and stepped inside. Grace smiled at him. Cassie didn’t move. She continued with her ‘project’, chattering away to herself, her back to him, head bowed, enthralled. She was making dough shapes with a random assortment of kitchen items: eggcups, pastry cutters, plastic beakers. The air was filled with the smell of Play-Doh. Tom crept up behind her, meaning only to see what she was making, nothing else.
He didn’t get far.
Cassie must have heard or sensed him, because she suddenly dropped the beaker she was holding and twisted round, but instead of delight at seeing her daddy, her face wavered for a second, then spilt open. She screamed. Once, then again and again. Screeching, high-pitched yelps, mouth stretched wide, teeth bared. Tom rushed forward to reassure her, but that only made things worse. She scrabbled backwards away from him, sending her playthings skittering across the kitchen floor, her eyes huge and dark. She was screaming with fear.
Tom backed off and Grace put out her arms. Cassie looked from Grace to Tom, then launched herself at her mother. Grace encircled her and hugged her close. The screaming stopped, abruptly, and a weird, brittle silence descended on the room. Tom eased himself down onto the floor. He pushed his hood back, but otherwise kept very still, scared of making another wrong move. Grace met his eyes with a look of pure bewilderment. ‘Cassie, honey, it’s only Daddy. He didn’t mean to frighten you.’ The child wriggled, burying herself further into Grace’s embrace. Grace gave it another long minute, then tried again. ‘Cassie. Please look up, sweetheart. It’s just Daddy. He needs to see that you’re okay. You gave him a fright.’ Cautiously Cassie raised her head and peeped at Tom. He smiled, equally cautiously, back at her. Her face seemed to balance, momentarily, on the cusp of two emotions, as if she were seeing two versions of him. Then her eyes cleared and she smiled and held out her hands, after a nod of encouragement from Grace, Tom went to take her.
A few minutes later it was as if nothing had happened. Cassie was calm and seemed perfectly happy, insisting that Tom and Grace admire her play-food, chatting away, a stream of new words and observations. When they nervously asked what had frightened her, she shook her head and simply passed them another Play-Doh cake to ‘eat’, refusing to be drawn on the subject. Tom raised the lump of bright-red and yellow dough to his lips and pretended it tasted lovely.
The second time came equally out of the blue, and it was worse, because this time they were in public.
It happened a month to the day after Cassie came to live with them – long enough for Tom to be feeling sufficiently confident to go out with his daughter on his own, and long enough for Grace to agree, hesitantly, to meet a friend for coffee, just for an hour. They were shopping when it happened, the most mundane of household chores, but one Cassie seemed to find fascinating. She loved shops, big or small, toy store or grocery; she adored anywhere with shelves full of stuff. Tom and Cassie had driven to the supermarket, spotting buses on the way and exchanging views about the best type of sandwich. Cassie favoured jam. Tom proclaimed worm-and-brown-sauce to be the best. In her cardigan pocket Cassie had her very own shopping list: Pom-Bears, a ‘nice’ banana and (if she was good) a Freddo Frog – Grace had added the caveat.
At the store, Tom let Cassie walk rather than suggesting that she ride in a trolley. She hated being coo
ped up when they went out; she preferred ‘helping’, which, in reality, meant ambling up and down the aisles, stopping at anything and everything that caught her eye. It slowed the process down immeasurably, but for Tom and Grace it was still a novelty. And it was nice to catch the indulgent smiles of other customers, who often stopped to chat and ask Cassie’s age and compliment them on her manners.
The trip that Saturday was going fine until Tom saw Cassie take a packet of chocolate biscuits from a shelf, without asking. Before he could stop her, she ripped it open and crammed one into her mouth. Jane had warned them about her slightly compulsive eating patterns, rooted, she believed, in the hunger that had been an everyday reality of her life with her birth mother. Even now, the regularity and availability of food in their house seemed to surprise Cassie, but the speed-eating and squirrelling food away in odd places were definitely on the decline. Grace still checked Cassie’s drawers and under her bed every day, just to be sure, but they hadn’t found a stash recently. So there was no excuse, not for blatant stealing.
‘Cassie!’ She looked at Tom, her cheeks still moving as she tried to swallow the crumbly evidence. ‘What are you doing? Give me that packet, this instant.’ He held out his hand. An old chap shopping nearby paused, obviously intrigued to see who was going to win the stand-off. Cassie swallowed what was in her mouth, looked defiantly at Tom and took another biscuit. ‘Oh no, you don’t, young lady!’ Even at this point Tom was still secretly amused by her stubbornness – the kid had some front! She bit into the second biscuit. ‘Cassie Haines, come here!’
But instead of heeding Tom’s instructions, Cassie turned and started walking – then trotting – away. Tom stood his ground. She carried on, running now: to the end of the aisle, then around it. That’s when Tom moved; in a battle of wills, being in the right was no substitute for having her in plain sight. He raced after her. She was already by the store entrance by the time he rounded the end of the aisle. He shouted, panic forcing his voice higher than normal. Cassie glanced at him and bolted outside. The entrance opened straight onto a busy car park. Tom chased after her, shocked at how quickly something so innocuous had turned into something potentially so dangerous. He lunged, grabbed and managed to catch hold of her arm just as a white van cruised past within centimetres of her. He pulled Cassie’s resistant little body to him, his heart pounding. Relief flooded through him. Then a sudden, razor-like pain flashed across the fingers of his left hand. It took him a second to register that she’d bitten him. In shock, his grip on her arm slipped and she shot away from him. ‘Cassie, stop!’
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