He noticed that she didn’t like to talk about herself, the questions he asked of her when they first began to meet always gently batted away. She was older than he was and he sensed she had a complicated private life beyond their weekly meet-ups, so he got used to not prying. And anyway, she was such a good listener; there was so much he wanted to tell her about his own unhappiness. “Poor Mac,” she’d say, stroking his hair, kissing his face, pulling him into bed. “Poor lovely Mac.”
And then, a revelation, a shock so great, so unexpected, it had knocked the breath from him. They’d been in bed, their naked limbs entwined, and he had just begun drifting into sleep. “I have something to tell you,” she had said. She sat up, her long brown hair spilling over her naked breasts, her lovely eyes fastened on his face, her shadow thrown huge across the wall behind her.
“What?” he’d said sleepily, then smiled. “Sounds serious.”
“It’s about your friend Luke.”
“Luke?” A jolt of surprise. “What about him?” And he’d recall later how he’d felt the first stirrings of unease, like a gust of cold air ruffling his hair, making his scalp prickle.
“He’s my half brother,” she said. “Oliver is my father too.”
He’d given a short, startled bark of laughter. Because surely it had to be a joke. And then he’d looked into her eyes and realized that it wasn’t. His first thoughts, of course, were that she was quite mad, and he’d felt a pull of disappointment, that this lovely woman who’d seemed to understand him so well, who had been such a comfort, was in fact, after all, completely insane. And how was he going to disentangle himself from this now? What sort of scene would there be? “Erm, listen, Hannah, I . . .”
“When I was seven years old,” she went on calmly, as though he hadn’t spoken, “I found out that Oliver Lawson was my real father, that he’d had an affair with my mother. She died when I was a few weeks old, and he gave me away to the people who I would grow up believing were my real parents.”
He’d sat up. “What the fuck are you talking about? I’ve known Luke’s family for years. I would know, I would— Fuck, you’re not joking, are you?”
“No,” she’d said. “No, I’m not.”
“Christ! I don’t . . . Wait. You knew I was a friend of Luke’s when we met. . . . That’s why you approached me?”
She leaned forward and took his hand, and he saw now that tears were spilling from her eyes. “Oh, Mac, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry for lying to you. I never thought I’d grow to have such deep feelings for you, that I’d start to fall for you the way I have. I just wanted some help—I thought you could help me, and I understand that you might hate me now but . . .” Overcome, she’d buried her face in her hands, weeping quietly.
He had stared at her in disbelief. “No,” he said, tentatively putting his hand on her shoulder. “No, shush now, I don’t hate you. . . . No, I— Okay, calm down, don’t cry. Just tell me from the beginning.”
And so she had. How Oliver had taken advantage of one of his young students, how he’d got her pregnant, then abandoned her, wanting nothing to do with Hannah when she was born. “Rose found out,” she said. “She found out and she arranged to meet my mother near where they all lived, at Dunwich, you know the cliffs there?”
“Yes,” Mac said, his unease deepening.
“My mother met her up there. She had me in my buggy with her. Rose was the last person to see her alive.”
“She . . . what? Hannah, what are you saying . . . ?”
“The papers said it was suicide. But I . . . I don’t know—I don’t think . . .”
“Oh, come on now! You can’t be serious. . . .”
But Hannah continued to tell him her story, the long sad tale of her childhood, how she’d tracked down the Lawsons, spied on their wonderful life, watched as her father doted on her siblings without a second thought for her. “My father, Mac, the father who’d given me away like I was rubbish.” She’d wiped her tears. “Mac, even if you don’t believe that Rose killed my mother, then her death was still Oliver’s fault, because of the way he treated her, the way he threw her away, threw both of us away.”
He’d stared at her. “So what do you want with me?” he asked at last. “Why am I here?” He was still trying to get his head around how completely he’d been duped, how entirely he’d believed their meeting had been mere chance.
She’d leaned forward. “I want you to help me teach Oliver a lesson. I want to make him see that he can’t treat people like that, his own daughter, and get away with it.”
Mac had begun to search around for his clothes then. “I’m sorry, but I think you better go now.”
“I’m telling the truth!” she cried. “My mother was Nadia Freeman. Her body was found washed up in the sea at Dunwich in 1981. It would have been in all the local papers. Look it up if you don’t believe me. Nadia Freeman was my mother. And Oliver Lawson is my father.”
He couldn’t look at her. “I don’t want any part of this. I don’t think we should see each other again.”
—
He didn’t hear from her in the weeks that followed, but he thought about her often. Could her strange tale be true? He could go to the library in Suffolk, look Nadia Freeman up in the local papers archive, but even if someone had died with her name, it didn’t mean Oliver or Rose had anything to do with it. But something kept nagging at him. He had always thought Hannah seemed vaguely familiar, and as soon as she began telling him who she really was, he had realized why: she was
