‘Pah, like that would mean anything, with the two of you in cahoots. Have you been in touch with her the whole time – all my life?’
‘No, absolutely not. It’s like she said: I first contacted her around six months ago. There was no communication before that. Genuinely, I didn’t even know where she was in the world. She could have settled in India or China, for all I knew.’
Dave had considered trying to contact her beforehand – many times over the years, despite the advice of his parents – his father in particular.
‘She was trouble, that one,’ Stephen told him repeatedly. ‘You and Rose are better off without her, trust me. Don’t look back. Don’t give her a second thought.’
How could he not think of her, though? He regularly wondered where she was and what she was doing.
But she’d been the one to leave. And the extreme way she’d insisted on being written out of their lives was so permanent. He felt like there was no point in approaching her about coming clean to Rose, because if she’d had a change of heart, she’d have approached him already. Plus, he knew that learning the truth and uncovering all the lies in the process would be a huge mountain for his daughter to climb. It also had the potential to rock his own relationship with her to the core.
‘So why the change of heart?’ Rose asks. ‘Why did you decide to contact her after so long?’
Dave presses his hands into the wood of the bench beneath him, smarting as he feels a splinter slide its way into one finger. Dammit. This is where things get tricky. Even trickier than they are already. Part of him is tempted not to give her the real reason now, after she’s had to absorb so much already today, but the clock is against him. He needs to push forward with the plan, even though he knows it will lead to yet more hurt for his daughter. This is what everything’s been leading to – today and all the preparation he put in beforehand to make it happen. It’s the right thing to do in the long run, he’s convinced of that. Being a parent sometimes means making tough decisions for the good of your child. They still hurt, though.
He feels every bit of pain that Rose experiences, physical and mental, as if it’s his own. It’s always been that way, ever since she was tiny. Like the time she climbed on a chair when he was in the shower, fell and cut her chin open. He’ll never forget the sheer panic and terror he felt. He can still hear her shriek of agony, picture all that blood. It was the first time that his precious Rose had been under real threat and vulnerable. He felt awful, berating himself for his poor parenting skills. It was a nightmare, but – somehow – he held himself together, did what had to be done and got them both safely through the episode in one piece.
Now he has to do the same again.
‘You’re an adult, Rose. You’re about to embark on a life of your own, away from me and your childhood home. One of the key concerns your mother and I—’
‘Do you have to keep calling her that?’ Rose snaps. ‘She might technically be my mother, assuming you’re telling me the truth this time, but she lost the right to be called that when she ditched me as a baby.’
‘Noted.’ Dave clears his throat before continuing. ‘We feared you could be damaged by having to grow up feeling abandoned by one of your birth parents. That it could get into your psyche while your personality and mindset were still forming. Now you’re a strong, independent woman, more than capable of handling whatever life throws at you, I thought it was only right that you know.’
He stops to catch his breath. He can feel it running away from him and he forces himself to take a few seconds to steady the ship.
Rose continues to look straight ahead in stony silence, her face locked into a scowl.
‘Now you’re an adult,’ he continues, ‘I worry that growing up thinking your mother was dead might have affected you in ways we didn’t foresee.’
She tuts. ‘Like what?’
‘I suspect, subconsciously, it made you crave the normality of a more traditional family – two parents, two or three kids – something along those lines. What I’ve never been able to give you. I wish I could have done. I wish I could have met someone I loved enough to want to invite them into our family, but you can’t force these things. It wasn’t only my desire to write fiction that left me when your … I mean, when Cassie left. My focus moved to more important things.’
‘You mean me?’
‘Yes.’
‘And let me guess: you’re about to tell me I shouldn’t rush into getting married. That I’m too young and I still have my whole life ahead of me. Please, change the bloody record. I know you don’t like Ryan, but I love him. I thought you’d accepted this now. Don’t you think a week before our wedding is a bit late for such discussions?
‘Meeting Cassie changes nothing, Dad. Do I want to settle down and have a family of my own? Too right I do. But why would knowing she’s not dead change that? If anything, it makes me glad to be moving out and starting my own life, away from you and your lies. You say this whole charade today was about me. I think it was about you; you’re afraid of being alone, so you’re trying to stop me leaving. Are you hoping to get back together with Cassie too? Good luck with that. She moved on long ago, Dad, like you should have done.’
Dave takes a deep breath. He refuses to rise to or even consider the veracity of any of her jibes. She’s lashing out, understandably, and he needs to get to the point.
‘I have to tell you something about Ryan. You’re not going to want to hear it, but you must.’
‘Dad, you don’t—’
‘No, Rose, please don’t interrupt me. This is too important. It can’t wait any longer. Ryan’s been cheating on you again. And not just once. It’s happened a few times, including—’
‘Stop, Dad. Just stop, for God’s sake. We’ve been through this. Why won’t you get the message? You’re being pathetic, desperate. Don’t you think I’d know if Ryan was cheating on me? As I’ve told you again and again, he made one huge mistake, ages ago, which he massively regrets. I forgave him. Why the hell can’t you? I’d never have got back together with him if there was a chance he’d do it again. He wouldn’t. He loves me too much. That’s why I’m marrying him.’
Dave waits for her to stop, before continuing, as calmly as he can, like she hasn’t interrupted him: ‘… including on his stag do in Brighton, when I understand a different woman stayed in his room with him on each of the two nights he was away.’
He gulps, hating the taste of those words in his mouth. But what choice does he have? He has to shock her out of her denial before it’s too late.
She stares at the pond, stony-faced. ‘I don’t believe you. Haven’t you lied enough to me already?’
Dave slides his phone out of his pocket, unlocks it and, with a heavy heart, selects the message he drafted earlier and presses send.
‘I’ve sent you an email,’ he says. ‘There are photos attached, which you should look at. You might not believe this, feeling as you do about me now, but I truly wish I didn’t have to tell you any of this. I’m not Ryan’s biggest fan, but that doesn’t mean I wanted to be proved right about him. Your happiness is far more important to me than my pride. But facts are facts. I’ve had my suspicions for a while, initially based on nothing more than fatherly intuition, which I put to one side for your sake. Then I started hearing occasional whispers, rumours about him.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Rose snipes. ‘This is ridiculous.’
‘I’ve lived around here a long time. I know a lot of people in the area and folk love to gossip.’
‘Why are you doing this to me, Dad? It’s cruel. Don’t you think today’s been hard enough already?’
She’s still not looking at him, but he can see that her face is red; tears are streaming down her cheeks. He desperately wants to hold her, to console her, but that’s not happening. For now at least, he’s the enemy.
Stick with the plan, hold your nerve, he tells himself. You’re doing what’s best, as hard as it might be.
‘Pleas
e look at the email, Rose. The photos speak for themselves, unfortunately.’
‘What if I say no? What if I don’t want to read your stupid email and I delete it without looking?’
‘You need to look at it, Rose.’ He stops talking and waits. His mind fills the gap by zipping him back to the memory of a meeting at the house, when Rose wasn’t around, a couple of weeks earlier.
‘Hello, come in,’ he said after answering the doorbell to the man he’d only met in person once before. His name was Winston Jones, a tubby chap in his mid-forties, average height with short mousy brown hair.
Dressed in dark jeans, a grey polo shirt and a navy anorak, he was the kind of person you barely noticed. Even the way he spoke, with a neutral accent you’d struggle to place, was unremarkable, all of which presumably made him good at his job as a private investigator.
Dave had hired the former policeman as a last resort. He knew it wasn’t exactly a normal thing to do, to pay someone to snoop on your daughter’s fiancé. But he had to know once and for all whether his suspicions, fuelled by the rumours he’d heard from a couple of business contacts, were true.
‘I’m told he’s been playing around, getting over-friendly with some of his female clients,’ he’d explained to Mr Jones during their first face-to-face meeting, at the investigator’s office, above a takeaway in Whitefield, north of Manchester. ‘It could be tittle-tattle – you know what gossips people can be – but he has cheated before. I want to find out for sure before he becomes an official part of my family.’
Mr Jones had returned with sufficient initial evidence to validate Dave’s fears and to convince him of the need for the surveillance to continue, at considerable cost, when Ryan and his mates headed down to Brighton for the stag do.
‘Can I get you a drink?’ Dave asked his guest after showing him into the lounge.
‘No, thank you.’
Mr Jones pulled a laptop out of his canvas bag and they got down to business: a final presentation of his findings, ahead of Dave settling the bill.
Dave’s heart sank in empathy for Rose as he finally viewed the surveillance photos. He’d already been primed with details of their contents, but actually seeing them was far worse. There was no sense of ‘I told you so’. He felt sick to his stomach, already worrying about how to break the news to his daughter.
‘As you can see,’ Mr Jones concluded. ‘You were right to be concerned. Ryan Thorne is a love rat, plain and simple. I wouldn’t want him within five miles of my daughter. He’s bad news.’ Handing Dave a USB stick containing all the evidence, he added: ‘I hope that’s sufficient for your requirements. You know where I am if you need anything else.’
Dave’s heart is pounding when Rose finally takes her phone out to look at his email. He’s only included three of the many photos he was supplied with, but they’re arguably the most damning.
One picture shows Ryan entering his Brighton hotel room at night with his hand groping the backside of a drunken young woman, who’s hanging all over him in a skimpy black dress. Another depicts him brazenly kissing a different woman as he shows her out of the same bedroom in daylight, dressed only in his boxers. The third shows him in the front seat of his work van, parked in a quiet rural spot, while someone with black curly hair – most definitely not Rose – appears to be giving him oral sex.
Goodness knows how Mr Jones got in so close on these shots. Dave doesn’t regret a single penny of what it cost to hire him. It’s horrible evidence for Rose to have to see, but it’s also exactly the kind of proof that’s needed to change her mind about her fiancé at this very late stage in the run-up to their wedding.
Dave would have preferred to present it earlier. He tried to bring up the rumours with Rose on various occasions prior to gaining this hard evidence, but his appeals repeatedly fell on deaf ears. She always shut him down before he could get to the point, claiming he was unfairly biased against Ryan.
‘Why do you keep scrabbling in the dirt for ways to try to break us up?’ she said in one especially hard-to-stomach rant. ‘I’m not interested. He’s not the boy who once broke my heart. He’s changed, whether you see that or not, and soon he’ll be my husband. Don’t make me choose between the two of you.’
So Dave did what he had to, pretending to drop the matter and biting his tongue, while secretly approaching Mr Jones.
However, by the time he finally had the necessary proof in his hands, the wedding was drawing close and the wheels were already in motion for today’s meeting with Cassie: so far the only other person with whom he’s discussed the investigation and its findings.
Hearing Rose’s first gasp as she looks at her phone – the awful photos he sent her – Dave winces. It’s a sound as uncomfortable to his ears as fingernails on a blackboard and she does so twice more, each new exclamation packed with more shock and disgust than the last. She slams her phone down next to her on the arm of the long wooden bench. She does nothing other than breathe heavily, until she turns to shoot daggers in his direction, eyes like slits.
‘Where did you get these? How long have you had them for?’
‘I, um, hired someone. A private investigator—’
‘What? How could you? Who are you? So much deception. I barely recognise you any more.’
‘I’m sorry. I know how it sounds, but I had to, Rose. I needed to get to the bottom of what was going on. I couldn’t stand back and let him make a fool of you all over again.’
‘Is that what you think I am, Dad: a fool?’
‘Of course not. How could I think that of you? I love you more than anything, more than anyone. I’m trying to protect you. As you can see from the photos, my suspicions were not unfounded. Far from it. Ryan’s been—’
‘How do you even know these photos are real?’ she snaps robotically, as Dave realises she still hasn’t accepted the truth about her fiancé. ‘They look fake to me.’
‘Trust me, they’re not,’ he says.
‘Trust you? Seriously? After everything I’ve just discovered? For all I know, you’re the one who doctored the images.’
To Dave’s surprise, she starts laughing. What begins as a giggle soon mutates into a head-thrown-back maniacal cackle, which he finds unnerving and alarming.
‘Are you okay, Rose?’ he asks, terrified that he’s dealt with all of this totally wrong.
She turns to him with her eyes stretched wide and a wild grin carved across her face. ‘Yes, I’m absolutely fine, Dad. Tickety-boo. Flipping fantastic. Oh, other than the tiny fact that my whole life has turned to bloody shit. But hey, you have to keep smiling, right? Hahaha! Hahaha!’
‘Rose,’ he says, struggling to stay calm. ‘I think you need to—’
‘No, I don’t want to know what you think,’ she says, springing to her feet and, before he can stop her, tossing her mobile into the middle of the pond.
‘Rose!’ he cries out. ‘What the hell? Why did you do that?’
‘Out of sight, out of mind.’ She turns her back on him and walks towards the hotel. ‘Don’t you dare try and follow me,’ she adds, her voice now stone-cold. ‘And don’t have me followed either by your creepy stalker. I want to be alone. Got it?’
‘I’m here for you, Rose, whenever you want,’ he says, grimacing.
He listens to the fading sound of her footsteps on the gravel path as she disappears into the distance.
CHAPTER 38
ROSE – ONE WEEK LATER
Rose wakes to the smell of coffee. She opens her eyes and blinks until her vision is clear, relishing the warm beams of sunshine that burst through every tiny gap they can find in the thin curtains.
‘Morning, sleepyhead,’ Cara’s voice calls through the open door of their en suite bathroom. ‘And what a lovely sunny Saturday morning it is. There’s a fresh cup of coffee on your bedside table. I made it from one of those posh pad things.’
‘So I see,’ Rose says, her voice still husky from the night before. ‘Thank you.’
‘You’re welco
me.’ Cara sounds chirpy, like she’s already been awake for hours.
‘How long have you been up?’
‘Oh, not too long. Twenty minutes?’
Rose picks up her mobile: a replacement, courtesy of Cara, for the one she threw into the pond last weekend, never to be seen again. It’s 8.47 a.m. ‘Checkout’s at eleven, right?’
‘Yep,’ her friend replies. ‘Plenty of time. How are you feeling? Big day today.’
As soon as Cara has said this, she sticks her head out of the bathroom door, toothbrush in one hand, toothpaste in the corner of her mouth, and pulls a face at Rose. ‘Sorry! Bad choice of words. I didn’t think, as usual.’
‘Don’t apologise. It’s fine. Today was supposed to be my wedding day. There, I’ve said it. No need to avoid it now. And yeah, it’s still a big day for me – just not the kind I was originally expecting. I’m feeling okay, I guess. Considering.’
Cara appears again. ‘I’ve said it before, but I think you’re amazing, Rose. It’s incredible how well you’re handling everything that’s been thrown at you. I’d be a mess in your shoes. Crying and screaming. Probably smashing things up. I’d be all over the place. You seem so together.’
She should have seen me alone last Saturday night, Rose thinks. Her mind jumps back to that moment, in another hotel room, soon after she’d looked at those damn photos of Ryan, tossed her phone and told her dad to give her some space.
She just about held it together until Hornby Lodge room service had delivered the first bottle of white wine. However, by the time the second arrived, less than an hour later, she must have looked awful. The young chap at the door asked her if everything was all right.
‘Not really,’ she replied. ‘There’s been a death in the family.’
‘Oh, I’m very sorry to hear that.’ He shuffled awkwardly on the spot. ‘If there’s anything else we can get for you, please let us know.’
‘I will.’ She shut the door in his face.
Why had she told him that lie?
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