Page 42 of The Puck Stops Here

He nodded, taking a few more strides. ‘So your mom… she sounds like a pretty cool lady?’

She smiled. ‘Yeah, she is.Toocool.’

‘How can someone be too cool?’

‘Someone who trusts too readily, loves too readily…’

‘Gets burned many times over?’

‘Yup. You’d think she’d learn but no, Mum’s all too willing to give people the benefit of the doubt. Men especially. I used to wonder whether she was in love with the idea of falling in love, rather than the men themselves.’

‘There’ve been a few then?’

‘Oh yeah, my mother seemed to make it her mission in life to find us a replacement for my father. The sooner they could move in the better, too.’

‘That can’t have been easy for you growing up.’

She shrugged. ‘It kind of went in cycles.’

‘Cycles?’

‘A happy few weeks, maybe a few months if I was lucky, of her falling head over heels. And then the misery of her falling apart when they inevitably walked away.’

‘What happened with your father? How come you don’t see him?’

She hesitated, worrying over what she was saying and realising she needn’t. What her father had put her through, put her mother through, it was child’s play compared to his past. Not that he’d told her any of it himself yet. But if she shared, maybe he would. Eventually.

‘He was a friend of my grandfather’s, a married man who gave a lot of this’ – she chatted with her fingers – ‘sweet talked his way in, promised her the world and got her pregnant. To this day, my grandparents don’t know he’s my father, and we don’t want them to know. They’ll only blame themselves.’

‘Jesus, she was so young. How long were they together before you…?’

‘A year. No laws were broken, only hearts. Well, one heart. He doesn’t have one.’

‘Shit.’ Blake shook his head. ‘And he was in your life for seven years, but no one knew…?’

She shrugged. ‘In my life is probably an overstatement. He was around, at family functions and he’d visit for the odd weekend under the pretence of travelling withwork. It’s amazing how easily one can hide a second family when they have the money, the means and the motivation.’

‘What changed?’

‘His wife found out. Not about me, but about Mum. And things spiralled from there… It wasn’t a fun alternate reality for him any more.’

‘Afunalternate reality?’

‘Oh yeah, that’s exactly what Mum was. Twenty years his wife’s junior with a child who was so desperate to make him stay longer I doted on his every word. Made him feel like super dad. Then one day his wife turned up on the doorstep and Mum hid me in my room, but I could hear everything. She was a screaming mess…’

And it was Chase’s wife Astrid now saw when she reimagined that scene. Knowing she’d done the same thing to another woman. Didn’t matter that she hadn’t known, she’d still done it.

‘Mum finally saw him for the man that he was, a heartless liar who didn’t have the balls to sort his life out. So she ended it. For a time, he pretended to care about me, to want to see me but it was just a ruse to see Mum. And when he realised it was over, he stopped calling and she gave up making excuses for him. She realised it was far healthier for me not to know him at all, than to know the douchebag that he truly was.’

‘And he let you go, just like that?’

‘You missed my point; he didn’t want me. He wanted her. She was young and beautiful. A total ego boost and a break from the mundane – a wife, three children, and a dog.’

His curse was lost on the wind now lashing sleet at their faces and making further conversation impossible as they walked the rest of the way.

‘Well, this is me…’ She paused beneath the covered entryway to her uncle’s building, and he gave a low whistle.

‘Nice place.’

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