Sweet Little Lies (Cat Kinsella #1)(116)

‘That’s the only one I have her. Apart from the one I gave to you guys. Anyway, keep going,’ he says, prodding me. ‘You’re supposed to be drooling over the Canada ones, whetting your appetite.’

And who could blame it for being whetted? There’s glaciers and waterfalls, mountain views and Downtown Vancouver at night. There’s also two of the cutest lads I’ve ever seen, growing up before my eyes. Nappy changes and bathtimes give way to senior school photos and ice hockey games, all steadily documented for the uncle they probably never expect to meet. The last few are really recent, there isn’t an ounce of puppy fat or a badly chosen outfit left to coo over. Jaws have been strengthened, chests defined and hair styled.

‘Good-looking lads, eh?’ he says, proudly. ‘Kian there, the one on the right with the flash hairdo – makes him look like he’s been electrocuted – doesn’t he look like his aunt Maryanne?’

The smell of burned cheese sends him hurtling into the kitchen in a whirlwind of panic and repeated expletives. Alone, I draw the photo closer. My breath comes quickly and my body feels like it might not withstand all the beams of ‘how-the-fuck-didn’t-I-see-this-before?’ energy currently chasing through my veins.

Because Kian Doyle does look a bit like his Aunt Maryanne, yes.

However, he looks a whole lot more like somebody else.

Somebody his aunt Maryanne never got to know.





31

‘There’s no point denying it, Gina. We can get his DNA from a hairbrush, a toothbrush, he doesn’t have to be here. Leo is Maryanne’s child.’ I square my shoulders, ready for the denial but she just looks at me, relaxed and resigned, like she’s almost wondering what took us so long.

I’m wondering what took us so long. Now I’ve seen it, I can’t un-see it. The same ocean-blue eyes, the same charcoal black hair. He’s a fraction different around the mouth maybe. Thinner lips, a slightly more tapered chin – inherited from whoever his father was, I suppose – but overall, the likeness is unmistakeable. His cheekbones rival Aiden’s.

A Doyle through and through.

‘Leo’s my child.’ Her declaration rings out across the empty visiting room. ‘I raised him. I nurtured him. I’m the one who stayed with him in hospital when he had bronchitis as a baby. I’m the one who sang to him, taught him the days of the week, how to tie his laces. I’m the only mother he’s ever known. That woman, the one who spat him out into the world, she didn’t want him. She chose designer clothes and fancy handbags over him. She doesn’t get to turn up years later laying claim to a child she literally held for two minutes.’ A brittle laugh. ‘She held on to the brown envelope a lot longer, I can tell you.’

‘Why did you keep him? Why didn’t you sell him on?’

She closes her eyes and breathes in deeply, lungs filling up with air while her head fills with precious memories. ‘He was just so beautiful. So perfect. I couldn’t understand how she could give him up but she did’ – she clicks her fingers – ‘just like that. She just shoved him into my arms like he was a pair of shoes in the wrong size and started counting out the money.’

‘And your dad let you keep him? That baby was worth a lot of money to him.’

She shrugs. ‘Maryanne had shown her true colours by then, suggesting he turn the whole thing into a production line. He knew there was more to be made so he said “yes”. I think he felt guilty.’

‘Guilty?’ I’m not sure it’s an emotion Patrick Mackie understands but I guess Gina knows him better than me. Even monsters can have hidden depths.

‘I’d been working for him for ten years by then. Ten years,’ she says, reinforcing the point. ‘I was still only twenty-eight. I think he knew working for him had stripped me of any life. I just wanted something to love, something that wasn’t business, a hint of a normal life. So I told him straight out that if he loved me, he’d let me take Maryanne’s baby.’

‘But you could have had your own baby?’ As soon as I say it, I realise that this might not be true. We know about her fertility issues and was IVF even so prevalent in the 1990s?

‘Taking an unwanted child was easier,’ she says simply. ‘My life was hectic enough with all the studying and working for Dad. Being pregnant would have been a nightmare – or that’s how I saw it then. Anyway, because of who I was, men hardly ever came near me. And spotty Med students weren’t really my type either.’

‘You didn’t get your normal life though, did you? You carried on with your dad’s business long after Leo.’

She corrects me quickly. ‘I carried on working at the flat, supervising the girls, delivering the babies. I stopped being involved in .?.?. everything else.’

‘By everything else, you mean the drugs, the prostitution rings, the major frauds?’

The look of pure malice could be for me, or for herself. Odds on, it’s the latter.

She shakes her head. ‘I never wanted to be part of all that. Never. And that’s part of the reason why having a child made sense. I knew Dad would let me step away from the more dangerous aspects if I was a mother.’ She leans forward onto the table, exhausted, broken. ‘Deep down, all I’d ever wanted was a proper career, a family, decent friends. And I finally got it when I met Nate. He was respectable.’