Chapter 106: what she never told me

Chapter 106 — What She Never Told Me

Roxanne read the message again, slowly, as though the words might rearrange themselves into something smaller. They did not. There’s something about your father I should have told you a long time ago.

Isla looked up from her desk. "You’ve gone the colour of porridge."

Roxanne handed her the phone. Isla read it, and her face softened. "Oh."

"Don’t," Roxanne said. "Don’t guess what it means."

"I wasn’t going to."

"You were already building a theory."

"Only a small one." Isla returned the phone carefully. "Are you going to ask her?"

Roxanne considered waiting until Visiting Weekend. It was weeks away. Weeks of imagining every terrible possibility, of lying awake composing versions of the truth, each worse than the last. She could not do that.

She took the phone into the corridor and called.

Amelia answered on the second ring, sounding startled. "Roxanne. Hello. How are your classes? Are you settled in your room? Are you eating properly?"

"Mother."

"The food there used to be quite poor, I remember—"

"You said there’s something about Dad you should have told me."

The line went quiet. Roxanne could hear a clock ticking somewhere in her mother’s house.

"Yes," Amelia said at last. "There is."

"Then tell me."

"Not over the phone, Roxanne."

"You don’t get to bring him up after all these years and then decide when I’m allowed to hear about him."

Another silence, shorter this time. Then Amelia exhaled, and her voice lost its polish. "You’re right. I’m sorry. I’ll tell you now."

Roxanne leaned against the wall and slid down it until she was sitting on the cold floor.

"Shortly before your father died, he was in contact with someone from his extended family. People you have never met. He had been thinking of bringing you to know them. He mentioned it to me once, and then the conversation was never finished." Her mother’s breath caught. "After he died, I found letters among his belongings, and an old address."

"And?"

"And I put them away. I was grieving, and exhausted, and so frightened that reopening his family would only make your loss heavier. You were so small. I thought, not yet. Later."

"Later," Roxanne repeated.

"Then I married Edward, and life became complicated, and every year it became harder to say. The silence grew until it was a problem all by itself." Amelia’s voice wavered. "That’s the truth of it. Nothing dramatic. No hidden scandal. I simply decided for you, and then I kept deciding."

Roxanne stared at the opposite wall. Her father was not alive. He was not secretly anything. He was a man who had meant to do something and run out of time, and her mother had buried the intention along with him.

"You decided what I could handle," she said. Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "Without asking me."

"Yes."

"Why now?"

"Because the longer I waited, the more ashamed I became. At first I wanted to protect you. Eventually I was only protecting myself from your reaction." A pause. "There’s no good excuse, Roxanne. I won’t insult you by offering one."

"You kept telling yourself you were protecting me. Did you ever stop to wonder whether I wanted to be protected from my own family?"

Amelia had no answer. Roxanne listened to her breathing and waited, and nothing came.

"That’s what I thought," Roxanne said quietly. "You keep mistaking silence for protection. You did it then, and you’ve been doing it ever since."

"Roxanne—"

"I’m going to go now. If I stay on, this turns into another apology, and I’m not ready to accept one."

She ended the call before her mother could say anything else, and sat there with the phone warm in her hand, shaking slightly.

Ten minutes later it buzzed. Three images arrived, one after another.

Two were letters, photographed on a kitchen table, the paper yellowed and the handwriting cramped. Roxanne enlarged the first and read it with her heart pounding. It was brief. Her father wrote that he hoped to introduce his daughter to the family when she was old enough, that he wanted her to know where she came from. The second was a reply, signed only with an initial, warm but guarded. Neither explained how close he had been to these people, or why he had lived apart from them.

The third image was a photograph. Her father stood in a garden, younger than in any picture she remembered, beside an elderly woman with silver hair and sharp, watchful eyes. On his other side stood a teenage boy, scowling at the camera. On the back, in faded ink, someone had written a name and the name of a village Roxanne had never heard of.

She studied the faces for a long time. She searched the old woman’s mouth and the boy’s jaw for something familiar. There was nothing. They were strangers, and she felt no sudden pull toward them, no ache of belonging.

What she felt was anger, hot and clean. Somebody had quietly closed a door, and she had never even been told it existed. Whether she would have wanted to walk through it was not the point. That had been hers to decide.

She was late to the common room that evening, and she knew it showed.

Liam was halfway through a story about a first-year and a stolen pastry when she sat down. He glanced at her face, and the punchline died in his mouth. "Anyway," he said, "terrible ending, not worth repeating. Who wants tea?"

Nobody questioned him, and Roxanne was grateful.

Roshan moved a cushion aside and asked, "Company or space? Either is fine."

"Company."

"Done." He didn’t ask why, and went back to his book.

Lucien looked up from the table. "The family form is due tomorrow afternoon."

"I’ve put Amelia down."

He nodded once, a brief look of approval crossing his face, and said nothing more.

Kai said nothing for a long while. He sat on the arm of the sofa beside her, and eventually he asked quietly, "Are you still angry with your mother?"

"Yes."

"All right."

He didn’t tell her to forgive Amelia. He didn’t tell her that parents make mistakes. Instead, when she spread the photographs across her phone screen, he stayed where he was, his shoulder almost touching hers, while she read the letters over and over. Once she tilted the screen toward him, and he looked at the old woman’s face with the same seriousness he gave everything, then looked away so she could have it back to herself.

The others kept their talk low and ordinary around them. Nobody tried to fix anything. It was the kindest thing they could have done.

Later, alone in her room, Roxanne wrote to her mother.

I’ll see you at Visiting Weekend. I have one condition. Bring every letter you found about Dad. All of them. Not a selection.

The reply came within a minute. Of course. I will bring everything.

Roxanne put the phone down. She had printed the photograph at the library that afternoon, and now she slid it into the bottom drawer of her desk, beneath old notes and a spare pen. She did not want to carry it everywhere, or stare at it until it became an obsession. She had not forgiven her mother. She did not know if she could. But she was willing to hear the rest of the story in person, and that would have to be enough for now.

She had just pulled back the covers when the phone buzzed again.

It was Amelia, a single line.

The woman in the photograph has been asking about you, too.

Roxanne sat very still. Then she opened the drawer, took out the photograph, and looked at the unfamiliar face once more, at the sharp eyes and the silver hair and the garden she had never seen.

For the first time, she wondered whether her father’s family had been waiting all these years for her to make contact, or whether they had reasons of their own for wanting her back.