Page 47 of All We Want for Christmas
‘Your mum?’ Flynn said, thinking he must have misheard what Molly had said, because what she’d said was impossible.
‘Imogen,’ Molly said slowly. ‘Imogen Harrison? Don’t you remember? Buttermere 2006?’
‘I er – don’t—’ Oh, God. ‘I –do.’
Flashes of waves lapping a moonlit shore came back to him. Of a dark-haired, very pretty girl he’d met on a visit to see his grandparents in Whitehaven. He and some friends had gone camping for the night at a tiny Lakeland site and ended up drinking round the fire with some other young campers. He’d also ended up with one of the girls.
Her name was Imogen – or Immy, as she’d introduced herself. She’d worn an ankle bracelet and she had a Northern accent and a laugh as warm as the sun. After they’d virtually ripped off each other’s clothes and had sex down by the lake, they’d sat together drinking cider, Immy wearing his sweatshirt to ward off the evening chill – until her friends came for her. She walked away, laughing and refusing his pleas for her number.
‘Don’t spoil it, Flynn … Let it be perfect like this for ever. You know it can’t go anywhere. We live too far apart and I have plans.’
She had plans. And he’d have bet his right arm they didn’t include having his child.
‘It’s coming back to you, isn’t it?’ Molly asked, staring at him with the same disapproval that his own mother had always shown when he’d come home late after being out on his bike. ‘You and my mum hooked up on the last night of the holiday. She said you’d drunk loads of cider and had sex by the lake. That’s when I was conceived.’
‘Oh God.’
She’d pushed the buggy to the side of the Ice House where it was a little quieter, but Flynn was still conscious of the world rushing by while he was trapped in a surreal bubble.
‘Mum was on the pill but she’d had a stomach upset and you were both too drunk to use a condom. You told her that, even though you were Cornish, you hated surfing, had just passed your motorbike test and one day you’d have a Harley Davidson.’ Molly paused before adding in a quiet voice. ‘And that she had beautiful eyes …’
Flynn was too stunned by the details to reply, both the intimate ones and the specifics of what he and Immy had spoken about on that evening. It all sounded so reckless now, though, at the time, it had felt spontaneous and special. His throat felt very dry, his voice strangled when he finally recovered himself.
‘I am – s-sorry.’
Molly looked hurt. ‘Sorry I’m here?’
‘No!’ he burst out in horror. ‘No, I didn’t meanthat. I’m sorry I never knew. Sorry that you had to find me and your mother never tried to find me. Are you – are you 100 per cent sure, though? That I’m your father?’
‘I’m sure,’ Molly said fiercely, ‘but I guess it’s a shock. We can do a DNA test if you like, but I know what it’ll say.’ She sounded so confident and she knew so much detail about that night that only her mother could have told her. ‘Mum said she didn’t even have your number so she couldn’t find you. She knew your first name and what you looked like but, back then, you weren’t online. It was only ten years later that she finally found out you’d joined Facebook.’
‘I don’t do social media …’ Flynn said, having always had a horror of sharing his boring existence and innermost secrets with the ether. ‘I didn’t want to join then, but everyone had and was using it to arrange meeting up. I felt I ought to.’
‘You regret it now, I bet.’ Molly laughed. ‘Because Mum did find you.’
‘B-but why didn’t she get in touch with me?’
‘I was ten by then and she didn’t want you getting involved. She’d managed on her own and met someone else. Her life had moved on. We all moved on without you.’
‘How did you find me now?’ he managed, hearing himself dismissed as an irrelevance – someone who might as well not have existed – in his own child’s life.
‘I’ve known your name for a while. When I was fourteen, Mum decided to tell me all about you. It was onlywhen I had Esme that I knew how much I wanted to find you myself. Esme changed the way I saw myself – and my place in the world, I suppose. I realised what being a parent means when she came along. Her dad isn’t much of a part of her life and so I appreciated what my mum went through to bring me up – on her own until I was four and she met my stepdad. I wanted to know who my birth father was.’
From the buggy, Esme let out a wail. Or it could have been a gurgle of excitement or hunger or cold – Flynn had no clue what his granddaughter –his granddaughter– wanted or needed. All this time … He’d had no clue his daughter existed.
It made him feel almost dizzy. He thrust his fingers through his hair. ‘I swear I had no idea …’
‘I can tell that,’ Molly said. ‘It’s a shock and I wish I’d told you another time, not at your work, but I’ve been holding on for so long now that it just burst out.’
‘What made decide to you tell me – now?’
‘Maybe I still wouldn’t have searched for you, but I overheard two of the castle workers in the café talking about the new man that had started. They said your name: Flynn Cafferty, and that you used to live in Cornwall – in Newquay.’
‘How the—’ Flynn bit back the expletive, some inner filter reminding him that his child and granddaughter were present.
‘I almost dropped a tray. I knew straight away it was you. I didn’t know what to do after that.’
‘Does your Nan know who I am?’ Flynn asked.
