‘I had an unhealthy relationship with food for a bit, but I didn’t need to go into hospital – it could have been dealt with at home.’
Kate is beginning to see a pattern emerging of a scared, confused and unwell young woman, and a father who was doing his best to protect her. Though she can understand how their father’s duty of care could have been portrayed by Lauren as Machiavellian.
‘Did you ever wonder . . .?’ she starts, knowing she has to tread lightly if she’s to get her point across before Lauren shuts her down, ‘. . . if Mum might have been the driving force?’
Lauren pulls herself up, Kate notices, and looks at her, suddenly alert.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, for as many reasons as you didn’t always get along with Dad, I’ve never felt as close to Mum.’
‘Perhaps it was just naturally geared up that way,’ offers Lauren.
‘Perhaps,’ moots Kate. ‘But I’m wondering if she had more control than we thought – now I know what I know.’
Lauren leans in. ‘Go on,’ she presses.
Kate remembers back to the argument she witnessed when she was younger; the context of which is only becoming clear to her now. ‘We were in the New Forest . . .’
Lauren furrows her brow.
‘It must have been when it was all kicking off about the baby.’
Lauren nods and looks at the tattered tissue in her hands.
Kate leans her elbows on the table and holds her fingers at her temples, desperately trying to delve into the deepest corners of her mind to recall what happened next. The outline is there, she just needs to fill in the detail. ‘We were in the house and you stormed out.’
‘That’s when Justin and I had decided to keep it,’ says Lauren.
Hearing the boy’s name takes Kate back. ‘Mum and Dad rowed after you’d left,’ she says. ‘She accused him of not doing enough.’
‘Enough what?’ asks Lauren.
‘I don’t know,’ says Kate. ‘I thought she’d meant he’d not done enough to stop you from leaving. She said something like, “if you don’t put a stop to this, I will not be held accountable for my actions.”’
Lauren screws her face up. ‘She must have been telling him to stop treating me like a child, to stop trying to control me.’
She could have been, but now it doesn’t ring quite true to Kate. ‘I wonder if she was talking about you and Justin – that Dad hadn’t done enough to discourage you from seeing him, or . . .’ She trails off, not wanting to state what appears to be blatantly obvious.
Lauren fixes her with a hard stare. ‘Or . . .?’
‘Or maybe she thought he hadn’t done enough to stop you going ahead with the pregnancy.’
‘But that doesn’t make any sense,’ says Lauren. ‘She told me that she was sorry but there was nothing she could do. She said that Dad had made his mind up and that was the end of it.’
Kate’s brain feels like it’s banging against the inside off her skull. ‘But after she’d gone to find you, I found Dad crying. He was in the study; you remember that room at the end of the corridor with the big open fire.’
Lauren nods. ‘What was he crying about?’
‘He just said that he was sad that we weren’t his little girls anymore. That all he’d ever wanted was for us to be happy.’
‘It was probably his guilty conscience,’ says Lauren, but Kate shakes her head.
‘Come on, had you ever seen him cry before?’
‘No.’
‘They were proper tears, Lauren. He was a broken man.’
‘Well, it wasn’t my fault that he couldn’t live with his decision.’
‘I don’t think it was his decision,’ says Kate, looking at Lauren. ‘I think Mum was telling him that he had to put a stop to it.’
Lauren shakes her head. ‘I think it’s more likely she had found out about his affair. It was all happening around that time.’
Kate takes a sip from her glass of water, wishing that it was a magic potion that would return her family to how it used to be. Somehow, it was easier to get along when all of their secrets were still hidden.
‘Had you told her you’d seen him with another woman by then?’ she asks.
Lauren thinks before answering. ‘No, that was after the summer holidays when I was in sixth form.’
‘Why would you do that?’ asks Kate, unable to keep the accusatory tone from her voice. ‘When you had no idea what was really going on?’
‘Because he’d just played the hand of God,’ cries Lauren. ‘How was it fair that he’d taken my baby away from me, then had a baby of his own behind our backs? How come he got to play happy families, when he’d left a trail of destruction behind him?’
‘What did Mum say when you told her?’
‘She fobbed me off and told me that it wasn’t what it seemed,’ says Lauren. ‘That she knew the woman.’
‘Well there you go then,’ says Kate, breathing out her relief. ‘How much more proof do you need, to know that Dad wouldn’t cheat? On Mum or us.’
‘Jess is proven to be our half sister by her DNA,’ says Lauren sympathetically.
‘I’m running my own DNA test,’ says Kate.
Lauren looks at her quizzically. ‘What for?’
‘Just to be sure,’ says Kate. ‘I’m waiting for the results as we speak.’
‘Well, if you’ve sent off Dad’s DNA, hoping that it’s not going to be a match to Jess, then I’m afraid you’re going to be bitterly disappointed.’
Kate looks Lauren in the eyes. ‘It’s not Dad’s I’m testing, it’s Mum’s.’
‘Have you gone completely mad?’ gasps Lauren. ‘You can’t honestly think that’s a possibility?’
‘I’ve thought it was a possibility from the minute Jess turned up,’ says Kate, unapologetically. ‘That’s why I got so mad when you were insisting she was Dad’s, aside from the simple fact that I didn’t want her to be. You may have seen stuff, but I saw stuff too.’
Lauren swallows hard. ‘You really think Mum’s hiding something?’
‘Yes,’ says Kate forthrightly. ‘I just don’t know what.’
40
Kate
‘Kate,
