Impossible to Forget(102)

‘It is,’ he said. ‘But not in the way that you think.’

Romany was confused. ‘How do you mean?’ she asked.

‘Well,’ he began slowly, ‘the coincidence isn’t so much that I knew your mum. It’s more that I was going out with someone that she met on a course.’

Romany didn’t really follow, but it didn’t matter. The main thing was that she had increased the number of people she could talk to about her mum.

‘Actually,’ Daniel continued, ‘it is a coincidence that me and Hope are together, and that your mum met Hope, but the reason I moved to York in the first place was to be closer to your mum.’

He turned his head further still so that she could see his face.

‘And you . . .’ he added.

A hush fell. Now he stared straight into her eyes the way he had done in the restaurant on Christmas Day. Romany blinked and then blinked again. Daniel was obviously trying to make a point, but she wasn’t following. Why would he want to be near her?

‘Romany,’ he began. He paused, rubbing his hand over his mouth, and took a deep breath.

But she was there.

She had got it.

She knew exactly what he was trying to tell her.

And suddenly there wasn’t enough oxygen in the confined space. She threw the car door open, making a passer-by jump and then swear at her indignantly. She had to get away. She didn’t know for certain what he was about to say but she didn’t want to hear it. She ran from the car without closing the door and straight to the flat, fumbling for her key in her jacket pocket. She threw a look over her shoulder, but he wasn’t following her. He was still sitting in exactly the same spot, as if frozen in time.

The key turned, the door swung open and Romany fell into the flat and slammed the door behind her.





53


Romany stood with her back against the door. Her breath was a ragged panting, and her heart was pounding so hard that it hurt. She squeezed her eyes shut while she tried to calm herself. A voice was speaking to her in her head and she knew it was her mum.

‘Slow down, Romey,’ she said. ‘Focus on the breath. In through the nose. Out through the mouth.’

Romany tried to do what her mum had taught her, but it wasn’t working. How could she make herself calm in the light of what she thought she’d just worked out? Was Daniel her dad? Was that what he had been about to tell her?

She tried to bring to mind all the things that her mum had ever told her about her dad, but there wasn’t much, just that they had loved each other very much, but that it hadn’t worked out. When Romany was younger and pressed for more details, her mum had just shaken her head and said that she would tell her everything she wanted to know when she was old enough. And then when she had been old enough, she hadn’t wanted to know, had refused, in fact, to listen.

So now, she had nothing to go on, no way of verifying what she thought Daniel was trying to say. She tried to picture his face, to see if she had ever felt that there was anything familiar about it, but nothing came to mind. He was just Daniel, Hope’s chef boyfriend, nice enough on the surface but with nothing to suggest that they shared DNA.

But he had known Mum. That she did believe. Her mum had told the tree stories over and over because Romany loved to hear them. She could accept that her mum and Daniel had been there in the tree-top camp together. She was even prepared to believe that they had gone out together back in the day. But this? It was too much to take in.

From upstairs she could hear Tiger calling down to her. ‘Is that you, Romey? Have you had a good time?’

And then, when she didn’t appear within the time he would have expected, his head appeared at the top of the stairs and he peered down at her.

‘What are you doing down there?’ he said, laughing at her. And then, ‘Hey. What’s up?’

Romany didn’t speak because she didn’t know how to start. She stayed where she was against the door with her eyes tightly shut like she’d done as a child when she wanted something to go away. She could hear Tiger making his way down the stairs towards her, but she was frozen to the spot.

‘Come on, Romes,’ he said as he got closer. ‘What’s this all about? Did something happen with Hope? Has she upset you?’

There wasn’t much room in the porch area; Tiger stayed where he was on the second step, so that when Romany opened her eyes she had to look up at him. The space felt enclosed and intimate.

‘Did you know my dad?’ she whispered.

There was a pause, a heartbeat before Tiger replied.

‘Ah,’ he said.

What was that supposed to mean? She hadn’t talked to the guardians about her dad for the same reasons that she’d refused to talk about him to her mum. But maybe they all knew, and it was just she who didn’t. In fact, that would make sense. They’d all been friends since they were teenagers. They were bound to know.

Apart from Hope, of course. How Hope fitted in had always been unclear to Romany and, she suspected, to them all. But was this it? Maybe it wasn’t Hope that her mum had wanted to be part of Romany’s life, but Hope’s boyfriend?

‘What do you mean, “Ah”?’ she asked. Her voice sounded harsh and she realised that she was building up to being angry.

‘I met your dad once,’ said Tiger. ‘Before you were born.’