The door to the room opened, but she didn’t raise her head. It was probably the exceedingly irritating woman who had headed in an hour or so ago. She’d been wearing an Audrey Dupont skirt. Autumn had noticed, and the realization had sickened her. Now, she’d gladly clean her keyboard with the designer skirt she had worried about creasing just days ago. It was immaterial, and it had taken a bodyguard from Hull to teach her what she should have known already.
‘Claire.’
The voice was male and vaguely familiar, but it took her a second to realize exactly who had come into the room. Her head jerked up, attentive at last, and she looked at her father for the first time in seventeen years.
The numbness fell away, and she crumpled before him. The whole trauma of the past week overrode her, and she reached across the table for him, clutching at his hands and letting the anguish pour out.
Through her tears, she could see the man she had missed for so long. The man she remembered as such an important figure in her childhood. The man who had provided her with all those most cherished memories.
The years had aged him. He was no longer the thirty-something from her photos. His once thick, auburn hair was lighter now, receding and flecked with gray at the edges. He had lines etched into his forehead, and a scar on his chin she didn’t remember, but those eyes, the eyes that mirrored hers, hadn’t altered at all.
‘Oh, Claire, I am so sorry,’ Rick spoke. He took his hands from hers and rested them on top of her head as she curled into the table.
She cried, and he let her until she had nothing left to give. Her breathing eventually calmed, and once she had raised her body from the table, he passed her a handkerchief. Not a Kleenex from a box, but a proper, old-fashioned, gentleman’s handkerchief, like the one he’d used to wipe ice cream off her face years ago.
‘If there had been any other way, believe me, I would have taken it,’ Rick said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Pretending to be dead, living a lie, moving from country to country in hiding. I was trying to do what was right for everyone, but I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t please everyone. I ended up pleasing no one and hurting those that mattered to me. Like you and your mother.’
Autumn shrugged. She knew it was an inappropriate response, but she didn’t know what else to do or say. She knew nothing about what he’d done, who he was, what he’d been through. She had judged her mother for keeping the secret, but how could she sit in judgment on a man she adored, who had lived half his life on the run?
‘Your mother and I agreed back then that it was better for you to believe I was dead than to get caught up in a web of deceit. You were only ten. You wouldn’t have been able to understand, and I couldn’t ask you to keep a secret that big. Just imagine having to trot out a lie to friends, to teachers, to boyfriends. We did what we thought was right at the time,’ Rick told her.
‘I missed you… every day,’ Autumn admitted, sniffing into the handkerchief.
‘And I missed you. You’ll never know how much,’ he said.
His voice was thick with sentiment, and Autumn squeezed his hands a little tighter. Then her heart lurched in her chest and she looked at him with widened eyes.
‘How’s Nathan? Which hospital did they take him to? If they didn’t take him to New Hall, could you get him moved? I’ll pay, make sure he gets a private room,’ Autumn said in a rush.
She felt, rather than saw, her father suck in a mouthful of air. He didn’t let go of her hands, but he dropped his eyes from hers momentarily. She started to count when he didn’t reply, and didn’t even try to stop herself from mouthing the words.
‘I’m sorry, Claire,’ Rick finally said.
‘What does that mean?’
‘You were close to him?’
‘I won’t believe he’s gone. I won’t,’ she stated, holding her breath and the tears in.
‘He was a good man. We worked together, you know, years ago, when he first joined the unit.’
‘I loved him… I love him,’ Autumn told.
‘If he hadn’t made that break for it, we might not have been able to save you, we might have been too late. I’ll always be indebted to him for that,’ Rick said.
‘He can’t be dead, he just can’t be. I won’t believe it.’
Her whole chest felt like it was lined with lead. The dad she hadn’t set eyes on for seventeen years sat opposite her, yet she didn’t feel it. She needed Nathan. She wanted Nathan. He had become her everything. He was going to be her new future. Where did she go from here?
‘I haven’t got long, Claire,’ Rick told her, his voice breaking through her thoughts.
‘What?’
‘I can’t stay here. I have to tell the government everything I know about As-Wana and the life I’ve been leading during the last month. Then I have to leave again. Things weren’t safe for me under the assumed name I’ve been using most recently. I had to disappear and lie low. The British weren’t sure whether I was being loyal to them. I think they thought I’d defected.’
Autumn wiped her eyes again. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said.
What was he saying to her? She’d just got him back, yet he was going to leave her again. Then who would she have? Blu-Daddy and Nathan were dead. Her father may as well be because he couldn’t be with her. Who else was there? Her mother? No, Alison had never had time for her before. Why would that change? She didn’t want to be alone. She’d spent most of her life alone.
