by Tricia Jones
Oh God.
Mia bit back the emotion that wanted to claw its way through her anger. At the bottom of it all, her mother had abandoned her.
“Why all the subterfuge? Couldn’t she have simply written me a letter?”
Armstrong was silent for long moments, as if weighing up what answer to give. Then he raised his chin. “She didn’t want Colcannon to know. She didn’t trust that he’d let you receive the things she wanted you to have. As it happens, she was right.”
“What?”
“When he found out you were receiving them, he wanted me to intercept them. To stop you. He was determined you’d never find out the truth. No doubt he feared you’d go to the Press, and at a time when his political career was set to rocket into the stratosphere. When Mr. O’Donnell came along, a newspaper reporter no less, he increased his threats.”
“Threats?”
“He knew you were investigating the identity of the sender. He said if you found out the truth and went after him, he’d do his best to hurt you in every way possible. He’d make sure your name was excluded from the list of contenders for the government adviser position, had already drafted a letter to that effect, a copy of which he took great pleasure in handing me when your young man took that photo. He also threatened to drag your mother’s name through the media and make sure that the press painted him as the victim, the aggrieved husband trying to come to terms with a beloved wife’s infidelity. That he’d make out your mother chose him because she was a money-grabbing adulteress who cared nothing for the child she abandoned. He’d say that he’d begged her to keep you and that he’d bring you up as his own, but that your mother refused because she didn’t want the constant reminder of a much lamented indiscretion.
“At first I thought to let him do just that, but then he threatened you. He had you mugged to show me how easily he could get to you. That’s when I put Laurence on you.”
Mia listened to her father’s words, but felt strangely detached from them. Perhaps because everything she’d learned was all too much to comprehend. She’d need time to process it all. So much time.
She stared at her father’s anguished face, and felt her raw heart shatter for him. “Did you love her?”
“With all my heart.”
“Did she love you?”
“Yes.”
“Then why didn’t she divorce Colcannon and marry you? Did you ask her?”
“I did.”
“But she stayed with him anyway. She chose to abandon us both and stay with him.”
“It wasn’t as clear cut as that, Mia. At the time, things were different. Colcannon was older than both of us and already a powerful man moving in exalted circles. Your mother thought she was doing what was best for all of us.”
“Did he threaten her?”
“Not in the way you mean, but she was scared. I had little money back then, was struggling to get my career moving in the area I wanted it to go. I had very little to offer her.”
None of that would have mattered, Mia thought miserably. If the woman who’d given birth to her had loved him, had loved her child. But she wasn’t about to say that to her father and add to his despair.
“When I collected her favorite jewelry, did you hate me doing that because it hurt to be reminded of her?”
He winced. “Perhaps, although I hated more that you didn’t know the truth.”
Mia sat back, attempting to withdraw emotionally as well as physically. Her body still felt so cold, icy cold. Her head as heavy as her heart. “Aunt Sylvia knew everything?”
Armstrong nodded. “She understood my reasons for doing what I did, although as you got older she thought you deserved to know the truth.” He stared down into his brandy, his fingers clenched tight around the crystal. “I know how you must despise me for lying to you all these years, Mia, but I hope to God you can at least understand that I never meant you to be hurt by any of this.”
“I understand that,” Mia said. “What I can’t accept is that you’ve let me live a lie. Everything I thought about myself isn’t actually true.”
“You’re the same amazing person,” he snapped. “None of this, none of the past, changes that. It will never change that.”
“But it does. Don’t you see? At the heart of everything I’ve ever done—my work, my research—it all revolves around the image I had of myself as a child who’d lost her mother at birth. A mother who’d loved me, who hadn’t wanted to leave, but had been cruelly taken away from me. Now, everything’s spun on its head. I don’t know who I am.”
Her father leaned forward about to refute her words, but she held up her hand. “I have to come to terms with all this, have to process it all. You need to give me the time to do that. I don’t know what I feel right now.”
She thought back on all the times she’d tried to find out about her mother, all the times her father had put a stop to her probing. “My birth certificate,” she said, her anger burning anew. “It lists my mother as having died…and her name…You lied about that, didn’t you? You gave her a fictitious name. How did you manage that, get one of your cronies to fudge the paperwork?”
His stricken look was her answer.
“So even my mother’s name was a lie…”
Hurt, so deep it lodged in her heart like a block of stone, piercing her lungs and stealing her breath. Abandoned by a mother who didn’t care and lied to by a father whose treachery knew no bounds when it came to hiding the truth from her. God. She needed to get out. She needed to breathe. Needed to escape. To think. To close in on herself and retreat to her own secure world.
“Mia…”
Vaguely aware of her father shooting to his feet, she fled to the study door. In the hallway her aunt stood talking to Saul. She hadn’t heard him arrive, hadn’t heard anything over the thump of her heart, the roaring in her brain.
Mia yanked open the front door and stumbled down the steps onto the pavement. The cold hit her body, merging with the ice in her veins. She wrapped her arms around herself and fled down the street, barely seeing anything through the veil of tears. At the corner, she headed in the direction of the tube station. Her only thought was to get to the university. To her office. Nobody would be there at this time of day. She would be safe. Secure. Everything familiar. Honest and straightforward. No lies, no deception.
She went to step off the pavement, but a hand grabbed her. She whirled around blindly. Anticipating her father, she instead glared up into Saul’s concerned face. “Leave me,” she demanded as his grip on her arm tightened. “I have to be alone.”
“Not going to happen,” he grated. “Where the hell are you heading anyway? You’ll catch your death.”
His grip loosened, then her coat settled across her shoulders. She shuddered in a breath. “It’s all been a lie,” she mumbled. “Everything about my life has been a lie.” As if uttering the words seeped the remaining energy from her body, she sank against his chest.
“Come on back,” he said rubbing her shoulders through the coat. “I don’t know what’s going on, but let’s go sort it out.”
Although the feel of his solid chest and the warmth of his body comforted at some visceral level, she made herself pull away from him. “My mother never died.” Her breath hitched as she spoke the words. “She was married. They had an affair. She abandoned me to stay with Colcannon.”
Saul’s eyebrows drew together in a puzzled frown. “Your mother had an affair with Colcannon?”
Impatiently, Mia shook her head. “With my father. My mother had an affair with my father, but she didn’t want me enough to stay. She wanted Colcannon more. She wanted the trappings of his career, the chance to be the wife of a future premier, she wanted all of that more than she wanted to keep me. She was the one sending me all that stuff.”
Saul continued to rub at her shoulders and incongruously she wanted to laugh at his baffled expression as he tried to take it all in. “It was your mother sending you the notes?”
“Apparently
she wanted me to know how much she always loved me.” Mia almost spat out the words that lay bitter on her tongue. “Allegedly she was haunted by the reality of having to give me up. Like she didn’t have a choice. Like she was forced into the decision.”
“Maybe she was.”
“My dad says he asked her to divorce Colcannon and marry him, but she wouldn’t give up what she had to stay with a struggling doctor and a kid she never planned for and never wanted.”
“I doubt those were your father’s words.”
“I’m not stupid, I can read subtext as well as the next person.”
Saul hesitated, slid one hand down to his coat pocket where something lay inside. “Look, why don’t we go to my place. Get you warmed up, then we can talk this through.”
“I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to talk this through. The facts are the facts. I’ve been lied to, treated like a moron who can’t be trusted to know the truth of my existence. How can I ever come to terms with that?”
He turned her toward the street and hailed a taxi. “Let’s at least take a stab at it.”
An hour later, Mia sat nursing a large shot of whisky while Saul stood in front of her holding a large packet. His expression grim, his jaw tightened as he swallowed and his eyes darkened with a look she couldn’t quite fathom.
She’d told him the whole story and he’d sat beside her quietly supportive, his hand touching her thigh the whole time. While she’d welcomed the contact, which seemed to quiet her, comfort her, made her feel less alone, she now had the awful feeling that another bombshell was about to hit.
“Your father and I met with someone today.” Saul tapped the packet against his hand. “It was the solicitor tasked with arranging to send you the notes and gifts. He wouldn’t reveal the identity of the sender, although now I realize it was your mother, but simply said he’d been carrying out a dear friend’s dying request.”
The familiar chill trickled down her spine.
“Apparently, your mother’s last wish was for you to receive certain items. When Colcannon found out, he warned the solicitor to stop sending them. He threatened him with disbarment, which the man knew wasn’t an idle threat seeing as Colcannon would have the ability to make it happen. But he respected your mother and wanted to carry out her wishes so he gave the rest of the notes and gifts to me to make sure you received when all the flack had settled.” Saul handed her the packet. “These are yours.”
Mia took it as if it contained some explosive device. “Why did he give them to you and not my father?”
Saul shrugged. “He said it was your mother’s wishes. Maybe she thought your dad would keep it from you to protect you from knowing the truth.”
Mia swallowed, then looked down at the package.
“Would you like to be alone?”
She shook her head. “Will you stay with me? While I read them?”
Saul took up his spot beside her on the sofa. His knee touched hers and she took comfort in the silent support the gesture offered. With shaking hands, she tore open the sealing strip and emptied the contents into her lap. Two letters and a small box.
Each letter was marked with a send date and Mia selected the first one and slipped her thumb underneath the seal. Despite trying to steel herself against the escalating emotion, her heart pushed into her throat as she read,
Always in my heart
Over and over she devoured the simple line until she blinked away the treacherous moisture that covered her eyes. She wouldn’t weep tears for the woman who had abandoned her. Absently, she gave the note and envelope to Saul then, steeling herself, slid open the second envelope and pulled out the remaining note.
My beautiful love
Again the tears threatened but she sniffed in a breath before handing the note to Saul who placed it carefully on top of the previous note.
With shaking hands, Mia picked up the small box and opened the lid. Nudging aside the tissue paper she found another ring, much the same as the one she had received before, but this time with a large sapphire sparkling at the center of its platinum setting. Mia snapped the small lapis blue box closed and without offering it to Saul, thumped it on the coffee table.
“She thought a few notes and some jewelry would make everything right. That it would make up for what she did. Not just to me, but to my father. He loved her, asked her to marry him. Yet she preferred the trappings of life with a rich and powerful man.”
Mia huffed. “Ironic, isn’t it? Dad became one of the country’s eminent coroners, and while he can’t match the lofty social standing of a prominent politician, he’s not exactly poor.” Her tone held all the fury that simmered beneath the surface of her pain. “She could have stuck with him. Eventually he would have given her much of what she had with Colcannon. But the fact was, she didn’t want me. It was easier to dump me and get on with her life.”
“Mia, that’s not—”
“All those years and she never once tried to contact me. Her own daughter, her own flesh and blood.” She threw her hand out toward the box and the notes Saul had placed next to them on the coffee table. “How could she even begin to think that all this would make that right?”
“Perhaps in the end it was all she had. The only way she could show you how much she regretted what she’d done and her hopes that you might find some way to forgive her.”
She reeled on Saul. “How am I supposed to do that?”
“You can take a look back over her life since you were born,” Saul offered. “Seems she wasn’t an especially happy woman, she had her demons. I’d say much of that had to do with her decision to let you go.”
“You can’t know that, any more than I can.”
“I can know that her only wish when she died was to get these notes and gifts to you. She didn’t want you to know who she was. She didn’t want you to be hurt by that. All she wanted was to give you something of herself. To make that connection. Okay, she might have gone about it in a piss-poor way but then, she wasn’t a rational woman, at least not toward the end of her life. Emotional and mental problems, from what I could gather.”
“How do you know that?”
“I took a look at Colcannon’s relationship with her. Wanted to see if all was well on the marital front. I only had rumor to go on where his alleged misdemeanors were concerned. Often spousal problems can indicate what path a man will go down when he gets himself chin deep in trouble.”
“It was common knowledge that it was a happy marriage,” Mia said, although she wondered now if that was a smokescreen. “She had health problems, but he always played the loving husband.”
“I’ve got to wonder how much of those problems were his doing. The last few years she’s been in and out of a highly secure care facility only accessible to the exalted few. A man of his power can hush up all kinds of rumor if he knows how.”
“He destroyed her,” Mia said almost to herself. “There’s a part of me that wants vengeance for that. For her and for me.”
“And your father?”
“For him to, but I can’t forget he lied to me. He made me think I was someone I wasn’t. He even had her name doctored on my birth certificate. Made up some fictitious mother for me.”
“He wanted to protect you.”
“God. That’s such a copout. He let me believe my mother was dead, Saul.”
“And if he hadn’t? What would you have done, gone in search of her?”
“Maybe.” Mia took a shuddering breath in and let it out slowly. “At least I would have known the truth. I would have known who I really was.”
“And it would have eaten you up. Do you think your life would have been as good as it is now if you’d spent the most part being bitter and hurt? Your father did the best he knew how. He made the decision he thought was best for you.”
Tired, confused, Mia looked at Saul. “Is that what you did? Made the decision you thought was best for me?” When he didn’t answer, she shook her head. “After our conversation, you still went ahead
and met with this solicitor without telling me. Did you think I couldn’t handle all this without the two men in my life protecting me and sheltering poor little Mia from the truth of it all?”
Saul’s shoulders went stiff. “It wasn’t like that.”
“No,” Mia said wearily. “It never is.” She stood and walked to the door, grabbing her coat from the stand on the way. She almost made it, her hand on the doorknob, when Saul intercepted her. “Don’t leave yet.”
She huffed despondently. “I don’t want to be around you. I don’t want to be around any of you.”
“I get that,” Saul said, although he looked far from convinced. “But just let’s talk this through some more. I don’t want you on your own right now.”
She raised her eyebrows at him. “Really? Well, here’s a piece of news for you.” She moved a couple of inches toward him and stabbed a finger into his chest. “You don’t get to decide anything about me or about anything that affects me, not any more. I think you’ve done enough of that already. As far as I’m concerned, that’s it. We’re finished. Through. I don’t want to see you or hear from you again.” Another solid jab that almost made her wince with the force of it. “Got that?”
Now she did yank open the door and storm down the stairs and out into the now-dark evening. She managed to get a few streets away, not really knowing where she was heading, before Saul caught up with her. He didn’t touch her, but walked alongside her saying nothing, his hands pushed deep into his coat pockets. A desperate kind of fury propelled her along, stealing her breath and any words of censure she might have felt like throwing at him.
Truth was, she felt all talked out. She didn’t even want to think any more. What she needed was to work. To lose herself in something so exacting and all consuming that she would have no option but to put aside everything that hurt and made her feel so damn desolate.
Though Saul walked silently, she’d never in that moment felt so alone in her life. She felt betrayed by everyone she loved most—her father, her aunt. But more than that, she felt the loss of Saul. Of his quiet support and comfort. Yet, like her family, he’d deceived her. Even after she’d told him how she felt the first time he omitted to tell her about seeing her father with Colcannon, he’d still made the decision to leave her out of what concerned her.
