The Death of Mrs. Westaway(95)

“Ezra.” Hal felt a lump in her throat, and she took a deep breath. “Ezra, can I show you something?”

He nodded, puzzled, and Hal dug in her pocket and pulled out her tarot tin. Inside was the photograph Abel had given her, folded in half. She unfolded it carefully, and watched as Ezra’s face split in a smile of recognition, though there was something sad in his eyes too. He reached out, and touched the cheek of his twin, very gently, as if she could feel it through the paper.

“Ezra, did you—do you know . . . who took this photo?”

He looked up at her, frowning slightly, as though he had been somewhere very far away, and the effort was in dragging his thoughts back to the present day.

“Sorry, what did you say?”

“Who took this photo?”

“I’m not sure if I remember,” he said slowly. “Why do you ask?”

“Because—” Hal took a deep breath. “Because I think—I think he might be my father.” The words felt like a confession, and she felt a great release of some kind of tension she had been hardly aware of holding back, but they provoked no reaction in Ezra; he just continued to look at her, puzzled.

“Why do you say that?”

“I found my mother’s diary,” Hal said. “She talks about this day—about the person taking the photograph. That’s all I know about him—that and the fact that he had blue eyes.”

“Blue eyes?” Ezra said. He frowned again, not following her logic. “But yours are dark. How did you work that out?”

“It’s in the diary too,” Hal said. It was such a relief to talk it over with someone that she felt the words tumbling out in her eagerness to explain. “There’s this line she writes, his blue eyes meeting her dark ones. And she mentions someone called Ed, says that he was there the day the photograph was taken. I asked Abel, but he said there was no one else there apart from the four of you—but—”

She broke off. Ezra’s face had changed. He looked fully in the here and now, and there was a touch of something Hal could not place in his expression. She thought it might be a kind of dread.

“But that’s not true,” he said, very slowly. Hal nodded. She felt something inside her grow quite still, waiting.

“Oh God,” Ezra said. He put his face in his hands. “Abel. What have you done?”

“So . . . he was lying?”

“Yes. But I don’t know why he would protect him.”

“Protect who?” Hal asked. She was almost certain she already knew, but she needed to hear the name—hear it from the lips of someone who had been there, someone who could tell her for sure.

“Edward.”

Hal felt her stomach turn inside her, as if she were on the Twister at the foot of the pier and it had flipped her in a great arc above the sea, one of those sickening twists that left you gasping.

So it was true.

She swallowed. It was so strange. All the pieces had pointed to him—the name in the diary, the blue eyes . . . and yet . . . and yet she felt no connection to him, and now that Ezra had confirmed her suspicions she felt nothing except a kind of sickness.

He is my father, she thought, trying to make it real. Edward is my father—why would my mother lie about it all these years?

Why had he said nothing? Abel must know the truth after all—or suspect it, at least—or else why would he have lied to protect his lover from Hal’s inquiries?

But why lie? Why should Edward hide his identity from his own daughter?

Unless . . . unless there was something else he was hiding. . . .

“Edward,” she managed, her lips dry. “He was definitely there? He was the one taking the photograph?”

Ezra nodded.

“So he’s my . . .” But she could not say the word aloud. She shut her eyes, pressing her fingers to her temples, trying to see him. There was nothing of herself in his face—but perhaps that was not surprising. When she opened her eyes and stared down at the photograph on the table, it was her own face she saw, in her mother’s. She was her mother’s daughter, through and through.

It was as if her mother had erased her father’s DNA through sheer force of will.

“Hal—don’t,” Ezra said awkwardly. He looked profoundly uncomfortable and ill-equipped to be having this conversation, and Hal could tell that every atom of him would have rather got up and walked into the night, but that he was steeling himself to see this through. “Don’t jump to conclusions, it’s just a picture.”

But Hal had spent too long reading the diary, too long puzzling it out, to believe him. It was the only way it made sense. Edward—the man taking the picture—was her father. And for some reason Abel was desperate to conceal that fact. Desperate enough to tell a lie he must have known would come home to roost at some point.

“I don’t get it,” Hal said. She looked down. Her fingers were crushing the paper cup of coffee, and she forced them to release. “Why would he lie?”

“I don’t know.” They sat in silence for a long minute, and then Ezra, with an effort, put out his hand to Hal’s shoulder. “Hal, are—are you okay?”

“I’m not sure,” she whispered, and for a moment he rested his hand there and she felt the warmth of his fingers striking through her jacket, and she had a great urge to turn and cry into his shoulder. There was silence as she struggled to master herself.