Behind Every Lie(67)

“But you killed yourself!”

“No! I faked my death to throw Sebastian off our trail.”

“I … how?”

“I was crossing the bridge on my way to meet you at the hotel and I realized: if Sebastian thought Laura and I were dead, he wouldn’t look for us. So I got Laura’s old buggy and wrote a suicide note and left them on the bridge. I knew David would tell the police I had been medicated for depression before. But by the time I got to the hotel, you and Laura were gone.”

“I was afraid Seb would find my passport gone and come looking for me.” I could barely get the words past my constricted throat. “As soon as I found out you were dead, we went to the airport. Where have you been all this time?”

“Obviously I couldn’t stay in London, so I went to New York. I thought I’d be able to track you when you withdrew money from that bank account I set up. I got a job as a waitress, and I started painting. My work started selling. And then one day I checked the bank account and saw you’d withdrawn money from a bank in Chicago. I got a flight there and looked for you, but never found you.” Rose grasped my hands. “I checked the account every day for years, but you never withdrew anything until last month.”

“I bought a house.” My voice sounded hollow. I wanted to cry, but the tears had been incinerated somewhere between my belly and my eyeballs.

“I saw that the money had been paid to a mortgage company for a person named Kat Hansen in Seattle. I googled that name and found the school you work at. There’s a picture of you on the staff pages.”

A chill wind kicked up, sending the Japanese maple leaves shivering. My vision went momentarily blurry, and I realized it had been a rather long time since I had blinked.

“Let me make sure I understand this correctly,” I said slowly. “You have been living the carefree, child-free life of an artist you always wanted in New York, whilst I have been raising your daughter for eight years and thinking you were dead, and that it was my fault?”

Rose’s face closed, tight as a fist. She dropped my hands and stepped away from me. “Don’t make it sound like that. I tried to find you! I missed Laura! I was utterly bereft without her.”

Anger, too much anger, flared in me. “What do you expect to happen now, Rose? She thinks I’m her mum.”

“We’ll tell her the truth. It’ll be fine.”

I snorted and shook my head. Her temerity was truly unbelievable.

Rose straightened, her gray eyes hot as just-poured asphalt. “I’m her mother. I did what I had to in order to keep her safe.”

“No, I had to keep her safe! You don’t even know her name now!” Rose looked confused. “It’s Eva. Surely you don’t actually think you can just waltz in here and be her mother and expect her to accept you?”

Rose stared at me, mouth agape. Clearly this was not going the way she had expected. “You never told her about me?”

“No, of course not!” I threw my hands in the air. “I couldn’t risk her telling anybody who we really were.”

“You could’ve told her she was adopted.”

“I would’ve had to make up a whole story—”

She cut me off. “You made up a story anyway!”

I gritted my teeth together. “I was trying to balance the things she didn’t need to know with what would keep her safe. And I have, Rose. I have kept her safe. Me!”

“You aren’t better than me just because you got to stay and pretend to be her mother.”

I drew myself up to my full height and glared at her. “Perhaps not. But I deserve to be her mother more than you.”

“Don’t you think I would’ve chosen that? I couldn’t find you! It isn’t my fault, and Laura, Eva, whatever she’s called now, she needs to know that!”

“What do you think she will say when she finds out the truth? That we lied about who she is and our entire past? That I’m not her mother, you are, but you’ve been living a bohemian, child-free life this entire time, just like you always wanted?”

Rose paled and did not reply for a long time. Eventually she pulled a pack of cigarettes from her brown leather bag. She lit one and sucked deeply, pursing her lips as smoke gathered in her mouth. When she parted her lips, O-shaped clouds rolled out.

She smoked like that in silence for a few minutes, then stubbed the cigarette out and flicked it to the ground. She was too close, smelling of nicotine, ashy and dry. I stepped away, glancing at my watch.

“I must return to work.” I brushed away the crumbs that clung to the fibers of my wool coat.

“Oh, Katherine.” Her voice was thick, tears glistening in her eyes. “Do you hate me so much? That you would take my daughter from me?”

“I don’t hate you.” It was true. Never, not once in all these years, had I hated her. Quite the opposite, in fact. I had loved few more. But things were very, very different now.

“You must. It’s written across your face. I would hate you too, if you caused my daughter’s death.”

“What are you talking about?”

She sat on the bench, covering her face with her hands. “You must blame me for opening the window Eva fell out!”

My stomach dropped, leaving my knees weak, my hands shaking.