The Boy in the Photo

by Nicole Trope

  Michael is carrying Evie and he puts her down on the grass. She toddles over to Daniel and pats him on the shoulder. ‘Dani, Dani,’ she says, repeating the first word that she has learned.

  ‘Hey, Evie,’ Daniel says quietly.

  Evie toddles away. She grabs at handfuls of grass and attempts to pull out the wildflowers growing freely around the graves before Michael stops her.

  Daniel looks at the lettering on the grave, studying his father’s name. Gregory Edward Stanthorpe, beloved son and father. Daniel had not wanted those words to be used when the gravestone was being made.

  ‘I don’t want people to know he was my father,’ he’d said to his grandparents. ‘I don’t want anyone to know he was a father. He didn’t deserve to be a father.’

  Daniel is ashamed of himself now when he thinks about the way his Granny Audrey’s face had crumpled and she’d begun to cry. They’d looked so different when Michael took him to visit them at the hotel they were staying at. They had only come for long enough to organise the funeral and bury their son. His grandmother had still looked young, still looked capable, when he had seen her for that one night over six years ago.

  In the restaurant of the hotel Daniel had scanned the room for his grandparents and had completely missed them until a little old lady had waved him over. He had felt shock ripple through him at the idea that this thin, bent woman was his grandmother.

  He hadn’t wanted to discuss the funeral and he hadn’t wanted to listen to them talk about what a wonderful man his father had been. ‘He made some mistakes,’ his grandfather had acknowledged, ‘but he was pushed to the very limit by his circumstance and we all need to think about that before we judge him.’

  ‘No, William, we can’t make excuses anymore,’ his grandmother had said. ‘We simply can’t. I’m sorry, Daniel, we’re so sorry… I wish, I wish it could have been different. I wish I could have done it differently. We should have told the police… we should have,’ she’d said and then she had dissolved into tears.

  Daniel had not known what to say to that but he had fervently wished that Michael had not politely moved a few tables away so he and his grandparents could talk.

  Only when he had raised his voice and shouted, ‘I don’t want people to know he was my father,’ had Michael returned and tried to shush them all into behaving.

  ‘One day you may feel differently,’ Michael had said quietly, and even though he hadn’t believed he ever would, he is grateful now that he just shook his head and walked away rather than keep arguing with his grandparents. It had felt like it was too late for apologies then, but now he’s not so sure.

  He doesn’t know if he will ever speak to them again, if they will ever want to speak to him again. He had, as Michael told him weeks later, behaved badly, and Daniel had felt ashamed, ashamed at himself for yelling at his sad grandmother and then for walking away.

  ‘It was understandable,’ Michael had said. ‘You were traumatised, filled with grief and afraid, but they had just lost their son.’

  ‘What should I do about it?’ Daniel had asked, hating how whiny he sounded.

  ‘Maybe a letter? I know they don’t like emails but maybe you could write a letter and explain how things were, tell them you understand their grief. Maybe find a way to say something good about your father. They hadn’t seen him for six years and now he’s gone and they will never see him again. Try to give them something to hold onto, a memory or something positive.’

  ‘How can you want me to say something positive about him after everything he did? He was a… a monster. He stole my whole childhood, he stole… How can I say something positive?’

  ‘I don’t think he was a monster, Daniel. I think he was sick and delusional, and even though I do feel absolute hate and rage when I think of him, I try to keep reminding myself that he was mentally unstable. Only someone who was mentally unstable could have done what he did. That thought sometimes allows me to find a little peace. I’m not saying it always works but I do try. And in the end your grandparents are not really to blame for your father’s sins. They’ve also been damaged and terribly hurt by what has happened.’

  Daniel is thinking about writing the letter, still thinking about it after all these weeks. The trouble is that every time he sits down to start it, he begins thinking about everything that happened and then the sadness comes and that’s always followed by so much anger that he has to go down to the garage and punch the punching bag he and Michael use until he doesn’t even have the energy to lift his arms, let alone write a letter to his grandparents. But he will get to it; he will try and give them something to hold onto. They deserve that at least.

  As he looks at the grey granite stone, Daniel thinks that what he mostly felt all the years he was with his father was fear. He was afraid of his father dying and leaving him alone, afraid of the police finding him and sending him to foster care, afraid of seeing his mother again and having her tell him she didn’t love him, and mostly he was afraid of never seeing his mother again.

  He stands up, trying not to let the memories wash over him.

  He looks around at all the other graves in the cemetery, feeling a heavy sadness for Steven, who had helped him with his homework and taught him how to make his own knife and who thought everything in Australia was amazing. And now he’ll never get to do anything again.

  He knows now that they were never going to just take Evie and go. All along it had only been about how much his father hated his and Evie’s mother. It had all been about punishing her. Daniel has nightmares sometimes where he sees Evie in his father’s arms and he sees what he’s planning to do with his gun.

  That final night he hadn’t wanted to take Evie out of her cot.

  The vibration of his phone had woken him out of a deep sleep just before dawn. He had looked at the text from his father and curled himself up in bed. He wouldn’t do it. He couldn’t do it. And then the phone had buzzed again with a call.

  ‘I think this is wrong,’ he’d told his father in a whispered conversation. ‘I don’t want to do it. Evie will be too sad. She’ll miss Mum.’

  ‘Bring her out to me,’ his father had said. ‘Bring her out to me or I’m coming in there and everyone will land up dead.’

  Fear coursing through him, he had crept out with baby Evie in his arms, awake and alert, wide-eyed at being out of her cot in the dark. He’d hoped his mother would wake up, wished Michael would come home early from his night shift. When his father had stood up outside and waved the gun, Daniel had finally understood that he’d had it wrong. He had been entirely wrong. His father wasn’t just a liar, he was something else as well, something awful and terrible and filled with hate.

  He remembers the first shot, the one that hit his mother, and then his father’s screams, ‘No, no, Megan, no.’

  Had he loved her? Had he hated her? Daniel doesn’t believe his father knew the answer.

  And then the sirens were in the street and there were police cars and lights everywhere and Evie was screaming but his mother was still. And his heart had simply broken. He hadn’t ever understood what that meant before but now he knows it’s a cracking-open feeling in your chest that squeezes the breath out of your lungs. He had stood, staring at his mother, at his mum, who had always loved him, who had never wanted to lose him and who was now lost to him.

  ‘Put it down, put the gun down, put the gun down,’ he had heard from one, two, three different places, and then more shots.

  He had known the only thing he could do then was to save his sister. He had run upstairs to his bedroom with Evie, shut the door, held her on his lap and waited. His ears had buzzed and his heart had raced and his tears had kept falling and the only thing he had been able to think about was keeping Evie safe, keeping his baby sister from harm. ‘Michael will come, Evie,’ he had kept saying as his sister screamed. ‘Michael will come.’

  And finally, Michael had come.

  Daniel touches the gravestone. ‘Hey, Dad,’ he says and then he st
ands up and waves at Michael. ‘I’m done.’

  ‘Okay, buddy. Let’s go then.’

  ‘Dani, Dani,’ says Evie from Michael’s arms.

  Daniel takes Evie from Michael and straps her into her car seat as she pats him and smiles. ‘Dani, Dani.’

  ‘Time to go and visit Mum,’ he tells Evie.

  It’s not a long drive to the hospital.

  ‘Should we get her some more flowers?’ asks Daniel as they pass the gift shop.

  ‘Nah, don’t worry about it. I think that painting is everything she needs.’

  Daniel looks at the small framed picture in his hands. It’s of him and Evie, copied from a picture Michael took of the two of them on his phone. It had felt weird to stand in his mother’s studio, to use her paints and canvas without her there. Weird but also right. He had been very careful to clean the brushes the way she taught him when he was little, to put everything back in place.

  ‘Do you think she’ll like it?’ he asks Michael for the tenth time.

  ‘No,’ says Michael. ‘I think she’ll love it. I think it’s amazing.’

  Megan has been in the hospital for two months now.

  ‘The bullet hit her spine and veered off. We’ve repaired what we can but there has been a lot of trauma to the area. You need to prepare yourself and you need to prepare her for the fact that she may never walk again,’ the surgeon had told Michael and Daniel at the time.

  Michael hadn’t wanted him to listen, to hear, but Daniel had needed to know. He had grabbed Michael’s hand and Michael had held on tight, and Daniel had managed to hide his tears in front of the doctor.

  ‘But she’ll live?’ Daniel had asked.

  ‘She’ll live,’ she had said, and because she was wearing a white coat and she looked so capable, Daniel and Michael had believed her.

  ‘What rubbish,’ Megan had said when they’d explained it to her. ‘I’ll walk.’

  As they get out of the lift, Michael puts Evie down and she toddles over to her mother’s room, as familiar with this place as she is her own room at home. She comes with her grandmother every day to visit while Michael is at work, or with Emily, the new nanny.

  Evie pushes at the hospital door, trying to open it. ‘Dani, Dani,’ she says because his name is the word she uses for everything right now.

  Michael opens the door and Daniel pushes through, holding Evie’s hand. The bed is empty, as is Megan’s wheelchair.

  Daniel’s eyes dart wildly around the room. Oh no, oh no, oh no.

  ‘Hello, darlings,’ she says.

  Daniel turns around to see his mother. She is standing by the bathroom door, leaning heavily on two crutches. Relief makes him shudder and then he laughs.

  ‘You’re standing,’ says Michael, his voice filled with awe.

  ‘She’s standing,’ says Daniel.

  ‘I’m standing,’ says Megan.

  If you enjoyed being thrown into a family in turmoil, and all the secrets, lies and twists that came with it, don't miss Nicole’s first book, My Daughter’s Secret. This stunning novel explores a mother’s worst nightmare, and promises to have you reaching for the tissues.

  Order it now!

  My Daughter’s Secret

  My baby girl, I’ll never forget you – your smile, your laugh, the way your hair sparkles in the sun. I cannot comprehend this pain. I cannot breathe through it.

  For Claire, life as she knows it is over. And after the death of her daughter, Julia, she is searching for answers. Stumbling upon a pile of letters, hidden under Julia’s bed in an old, battered shoebox, she feels closer to her daughter than ever before. They tell her that Julia was happy, that she was thriving at university, that she was in love.

  But as the letters go on, Claire starts to feel uneasy at something hidden between the lines. Even as she grieves, she must prepare to face a shocking discovery. Because Julia was hiding a terrible secret – and when it’s uncovered, it will make Claire question everything she thought she knew about her daughter…

  An emotional and gripping page-turner that will stay with you long after you finish the last page. Fans of Liane Moriarty, Lisa Wingate and Jodi Picoult will love this moving and poignant tale that is full of shocking twists.

  Get it here!

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  Books by Nicole Trope

  My Daughter’s Secret

  The Boy in the Photo

  Available in Audio

  My Daughter’s Secret (UK listeners | US listeners)

  A Letter from Nicole

  Hello,

  I would like to thank you for taking the time to read The Boy in the Photo. If you did enjoy it, and want to keep up-to-date with all my latest releases, just sign up at the following link. Your email address will never be shared and you can unsubscribe at any time.

  Sign up here!

  For a long time, I was told to ‘write what you know’, but that never really worked for me. Instead I write what I fear.

  I write about families in crisis, about lives changing in the blink of an eye and about people who somehow manage to survive very difficult situations.

  I hope that you’ve connected with Megan and her family and their struggles. A child being taken from you is one of the very worst fears a mother has, and we are always so vigilant about strangers in our children’s lives. I can only imagine how much worse it would be to have your child stolen by someone who you were once in love with, and how difficult that must be for the child who is taken. Those thoughts are what led me to write this novel. Most of us have either experienced or know someone who has gone through divorce, and this is one of the worst-case scenarios of what can happen when love turns and hearts are broken. I know that there are many parents around the world who are hoping desperately to be allowed to reconnect with their children. I have tried to write about this with the authenticity it deserves.

  If you have enjoyed this novel, it would be lovely if you could take the time to leave a review. I read them all, and on days when I question whether or not I have another book in me, they lift me up and help me get back to work.

  I would also love to hear from you. You can find me on Facebook and Twitter, and I’m always happy to connect with readers.

  Thanks again for reading,

  Nicole x

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank Christina Demosthenous for her tireless and exceptional editing. Thanks to Deandra Lupu for a detailed and amazing copyedit. I would also like to thank Kim Nash, publicity and social media wizard, for guiding my novels into the world. Thanks to Alexandra Holmes, Ellen Gleeson, Liz Hatherell and to everyone who looks over the manuscript with fresh eyes. And, of course, to the whole team at Bookouture for their support.

  I would also like to thank, as always, my mother for being my first reader.

  Thanks also to David, Mikhayla, Isabella and Jacob.

  And once again, thank you to those who read, review and blog about my work. You remind me why I choose to do this every day.

  Published by Bookouture in 2019

  An imprint of StoryFire Ltd.

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.bookouture.com

  Copyright © Nicole Trope, 2019

  Nicole Trope has asserted her right to be identified

  as the author of this work.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers.

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-78681-864-5

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places
and events other than those clearly in the public domain, are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.