Chapter 130: I DIDN’T KNOW I WAS LOOKING

Chapter 132

LUMI

The taxi driver asks if I’m all right, and I say yes, because it’s quicker than the truth.

I’ve told him the name of the diner twice. He’s heard me both times, I think, but he keeps glancing at me in the mirror, and I keep looking at the wet street instead.

It rained while we were in the hotel. Everything outside is shiny and smeared, red brake lights stretched out like dropped sweets.

Chloe picked the place. When I rang her, she answered on the first ring, as if she’d been holding the phone in both hands, and she didn’t ask why I was calling.

She only said, "There’s a diner on Marlow Street, near the bus station. It’s open all night." Then, after a pause: "I don’t have anywhere else."

I didn’t know what to do with that last bit, so I didn’t do anything with it.

Ninety-nine point nine nine. I keep seeing the number. Ren read it out to me in his careful voice, the one he uses on me now, and I heard it fine, but part of me is still waiting for someone to tell me there’s been a mistake.

She said he was four months old when she handed him over. I’ve been trying to picture that all afternoon and I can’t, because the only baby I can picture is a three-year-old with chip grease on his chin. That’s the only picture I want to have of him. It’s easier that way.

*You’re humming,* Astra says.

I stop. I hadn’t realised.

*It’s the same three notes,* she adds, gently, the way you’d mention someone’s shoelace was undone. *Ren told you that.*

*Not now.*

*I’m only saying. You do it when you’re frightened.*

I press my knuckles against my mouth and watch the wipers go.

The diner is smaller than I expected, a narrow room with a long counter and eight booths, the kind of place where the menu is laminated and nobody has changed it since the nineties.

There’s a man asleep over a plate of eggs near the door. A waitress is rolling cutlery into napkins with the speed of someone who’s done it ten thousand times.

Chloe is in the back booth, facing the entrance, and I realise as I walk toward her that she’s been watching the door the entire time.

She stands up when she sees me. Then she doesn’t seem to know whether she’s supposed to stay standing, so she sits down again, and then half-rises.

"Please, it’s fine," I say and she drops back onto the seat like her strings have been cut.

She’s changed her coat. Under it she’s wearing a grey jumper with the sleeves pulled down over her hands.

In the courthouse corridor she looked twenty, maybe, and trying to look older. Here, under the strip lighting, she looks about fifteen.

I slide into the seat opposite. The vinyl creaks.

"Thank you for coming," she says. "I mean, thank you for ringing. I didn’t think you would."

"Neither did I." That comes out harder than I meant.

She flinches, just slightly, and I see her pull her hands further up into her sleeves.

I want to take it back, but I also don’t know if I want to take it back, and that’s a strange feeling. Like I’ve picked up a glass and don’t know whether it’s full.

The waitress arrives. I order tea, and then, because Chloe is staring at the table, I order a second one.

"I don’t want anything," Chloe whispers.

"It’s tea. You can hold it."

She almost smiles at that. But It’s gone fast.

When the waitress leaves, we both look at the sugar dispenser. It’s a glass one with a dented metal lid, and there’s a ring of old coffee on the table under it.

I’ve wiped a hundred tables like this. I know exactly how long that ring has been there.

"I don’t know where to start," I say.

"Me neither."

"Then I’ll ask you something and you can answer it however you want." I put my hands flat on the table so she can see them. They’re steady. I’m surprised. "How did you find out Sienna was going to bring you to the courthouse?"

"She rang me yesterday." Chloe’s voice is small and quick, like she’s trying to get through the sentence before it can hurt her.

"She said there was going to be a hearing. She said you’d lost your mind about Theo and that you’d made it hard for everyone and the only way to fix it was to be there. She said you deserved to know."

"And you believed her."

"I didn’t want to." She looks up for the first time. Her eyes are brown, like Theo’s. I knew they would be. I still have to look at the sugar dispenser again.

"But she’s the only person who’s ever... she’s the only one who’s ever said she’d help me with anything. So."

"With school."

"I wanted to be a nurse." It slips out like she hadn’t meant it to. "I’d got the place, then I got pregnant, and then..." She stops. "Doesn’t matter."

It does, though. I hear it in the way she says doesn’t matter. People say that when they’ve said it to themselves so often that the words have gone smooth.

The tea arrives. Chloe wraps both hands around the cup. I leave mine where it is.

"Tell me about when you had him," I say.

She’s quiet for long enough that I think she won’t. A bus pulls into the station across the road, and for a second the whole diner window fills with white light, and the man by the door stirs in his sleep.

"I was seventeen," Chloe says to her tea. "I told no one. My mum would’ve... it doesn’t matter what my mum would’ve done. I had planned to remove him but then I met Sienna who promised to pay me if I keep him. She told me about a friend of hers who couldn’t bear a child. She convinced me to keep him, told me she couldn’t watch to see her bestfriend hurt.

She said I’ll be like a sorrugate for her friend Why’d lose her marriage if she doesn’t find a child.

So I accepted to do it." I can’t say anything, I’m too stunned to say anything.

Sienna actually do need help because what kind of a twisted game did she play. Using my inability to bear a child, to get a child to keep her baby. Only to use that baby against me.

What type of human do such despicable act.

" Sienna didn’t show up again till after four months of putting to bed. She only transferred money twice a month.

I was in a flat with a girl I barely knew and I had him there. The girl called an ambulance because I was screaming too loud, and after that it was all forms." Chloe laughs, a dry little thing.

"So many forms. They kept asking what I wanted to do, and I kept saying I didn’t know, and the woman at the hospital said I didn’t have to decide yet."

"But you did."

"Not for a few months. I tried." Her voice thins. "I tried for four months. I fed him and I changed him. I sat on the floor of that flat at three in the morning because he wouldn’t stop crying and I didn’t have the first idea how to make him.

Sienna still wasn’t aggreing to come take him. So one night, I’d look at him and think, I’m going to break him. I’m going to do something wrong, and I won’t even know I’ve done it."

*Oh,* Astra says, very softly.

I don’t say anything. I can’t. There’s a little warm lump in my throat and I’m furious at it, because I came here wanting to be fair and I didn’t expect fair to be this close to crying.

"That night, I sent her a message stating that I couldn’t continue doing this. That I wanted to put him up for adoption because I didn’t want anything to happen to him. Not when they’re lots of couples looking for their own kids." Chloe goes on.

"I wanted him to have a good family. I wanted a good home for him. One that has money, a house and two parents. I never want him to lack anything." She presses her thumbnail into the cardboard sleeve of her cup.

"I received her text the next morning, saying she’ll be coming for him."

"Did she tell you her name was Sienna? That she was..."

"She said she was Sienna. She said she was married." Chloe’s eyes flick up. "She never said anything about pretending. I didn’t know about any of that till yesterday. I swear I didn’t. If I’d known she was telling everyone he was hers, I..." She stops again. "I don’t know what I’d have done. Probably nothing. That’s the truth."

I like that she says it. I don’t want to, but I do.

"I didn’t know she was a liar," Chloe says. "I thought she was just rich."

That startles a laugh out of me before I can stop it. It’s an ugly, surprised little sound, and Chloe looks scared for a second and then, slowly, looks relieved.

"Sorry," I say. "It’s just. That’s the whole of her, really. In a sentence."

"She’s your sister."

"Half." The word tastes sour. "Doesn’t feel like it makes much difference."

We sit for a while. The waitress comes past to top up the man’s coffee, and the radio behind the counter is playing something low and old, and my tea goes cold without my ever having touched it.

I take out my phone.

I hadn’t planned to. I’d planned to ask her what she wanted, and I’d planned to be firm.

I’d planned to say, with a calm face, that whatever happened next would be decided slowly and with people who knew about children. I rehearsed it on the way over. I was good at it.

But I’m holding the phone and I’m turning it round, and she’s looking at the screen.

It’s the photo from the bike. Ren’s mouth against my cheek, my face half out of the frame, laughing. And behind us, because I took it few weeks ago in the garden, Theo mid-run, arms out, blurred at the edges like a little kite.

"He’s got a thing about running at people with his arms out. He doesn’t stop to see if you’re ready." I say.

Chloe doesn’t take the phone. She leans forward, close, and her hand comes up toward the glass and stops an inch away.

"He’s so big," she says.

Her voice cracks straight down the middle on big, and I feel it in my own chest, like she’s reached across the table and pressed on something.

There it is. There’s the thing I came to find out, though I didn’t know I was looking.