Noah and Chloe obviously believed they were entitled to their father’s help.
Upsettingly, their father appeared to have indulged those assumptions.
Not for the first time, it struck Liv how different she, Noah and Chloe were, despite their shared blood and upbringing. But what she rarely acknowledged, because it was too painful, was how those differences might well have been fostered and cemented by the way their father had treated them. Had the die been cast at her birth? Had she always been destined to have the most pressure and the greatest expectation piled on top of her? Had Noah and Liv been free to grow up as their natures intended, because the burden of parental expectation was already being fulfilled by her?
Why had her father pushed her, where he pulled them?
Through the wall she heard Arthur fart, mutter and roll over, self-settling, a knack learnt early. She wondered how much her own parenting was already having an impact on the way her boys viewed and valued themselves. Whether Freddie’s nervousness and Arthur’s robustness were less inherent predispositions than learnt behaviours. Instinctively her hand crept towards her belly. Buried deep beneath the layers of clothing, skin and muscle, another potential child waited for Liv to make, mar, or destroy its future.
She was wide awake now. Mad with her brother and sister. Mad with her father. She reasoned she might as well go looking for Megan between the lines, in the seemingly innocuous debits and deposits.
She pulled the throw off the end of the bed, wrapped it around her legs, balanced her laptop on top of her makeshift ‘desk’ and began trawling through the hundreds of entries in her father’s accounts. Helpfully the statements went back years and included the period around the beginning of her father’s affair with Megan – as dated by Noah.
It didn’t take her long to find the evidence she was looking for: the debits for bars and restaurants in Darlington and Newcastle. She felt bruised and hurt by anything that might represent a gift for Megan. The payments to jewellery stores and bookshops and wine merchants all made her suspicious. There were regular orders of flowers – no way of knowing which had been for Megan, which for her mother; which had been a romantic gesture, which a distracting lie. The thought made Liv’s stomach ache. The purchase of a new, additional phone was the most obvious proof of the treachery.
Liv stored her anger away – on the debit side of the column for Megan.
Her anger with her father, for his duplicity and unfairness, had nowhere to go. That she had to absorb.
Around the time of the actual marriage breakdown it got messy and expensive. The withdrawals to pay solicitor’s fees starting appearing and escalating, as did the frequency of his wine deliveries. And there was increased evidence of trips to Darlington, and to Megan. The new love of his life.
Liv was exhausted, but she kept going. It was like reading a book with a predictable plot. Even though she knew where the story was heading, and that there was not going to be a happy ending, the compulsion to keep going was strong.
The next few months of statements were dominated by the new spending patterns prompted by Jonathan setting up home with Megan in The View at the same time as he severed his ties with their mother. It was an expensive period financially and, Liv had to imagine, emotionally.
After that, the spending settled down, as Megan and her father played Happy Families. In fact it became so monotonous scrolling through the ‘evidence’ of their cosy, settled, holiday-strewn life that Liv nearly missed the sudden appearance of a different solicitor on the payee list: Latimer & Co. Bone-tired as she was, she Googled the name. There were six solicitor firms with Latimer in the title. One of them in Darlington. That had to be the one.
Liv glanced at the time: 2.36 a.m. She should stop, but she couldn’t.
She read on, scrutinising each entry. There were a number of transfers to Latimer & Co. across the winter months of 2018, the last one for more than £120,000. As she reviewed the payments, Liv allowed an understanding of what she was looking at to seep into her tired, overwhelmed brain.
Her father had bought a house.
In Darlington.
Purchase price £127,000.
Paid in full.
Liv sat back. It made no sense, but then again, with a stirring, uneasy sensation, she realised it did. Around the time his prognosis had become terminal, her father had used a proportion of the pension he would never get to draw to provide Megan with a home after he was gone.
The enormity of the gesture – its generosity and consideration – shocked and impressed her. There it was, in black and white: proof that her father had not abandoned Megan to their mercy. Quite the contrary, he had protected her from it.
And yet she had not said a single word about it.
It was too much.
They were all liars. Megan. Noah, Chloe and, worst of all, her father. He had reached out and put his arms around them all, but not her. He had left Liv to fend for herself.
Quietly and sadly she whispered into the darkness, ‘What about me, Dad?’
Chapter 38
THE HOUSE was in darkness. Everyone else presumably asleep, or at least staring at the ceiling, in polite adherence to the bedtime etiquette at The View. It used to be ‘the law’ when they were little… Once you go up to bed, you must never come back downstairs, no matter what. As a child, Noah remembered wondering whether the rule still applied if the house was on fire, but he’d never plucked up the courage
