Two

 

Seph stared unblinkingly at the photo that had been attached to the email as her mum bustled into the dining room.

‘God knows where your dad’s got to,’ Laurel said, brushing her hair away from her face as she sat down. ‘The food will get cold if he doesn’t hurry up. He’s always late.’

Her jovial voice suggested that everything was completely normal. Like this was just an ordinary day with no surprise, shock or scandal waiting around the corner. Her face looked the same way it always had: warm and friendly, with an easy smile and kind, hazel eyes. There was nothing to suggest it was the face of someone capable of lying for years on end.

‘Everything alright? You look a bit off,’ Laurel said, her voice coaxing and trustworthy.

It was a voice that had always made it easy for Seph to confide in her, forging a relationship where she felt open and able to speak to her mum about anything. There’d never been a need for secrets, at least, not from Seph’s end and especially nothing as huge as this. Maybe it was a hoax or some kind of elaborate joke. It could even be a case of extremely sophisticated spam. Seph’s eyes flicked down to the phone in her hand, and she forced out a tiny laugh in an effort to make things seem less explosive than they were. Maybe it was like hoodoo. If she didn’t believe in it, it couldn’t be real.

‘I just got an email from some guy…’ Seph tailed off, shaking her head and shrugging her shoulders as she shakily touched the screen of her phone to go back to the email. ‘It’s really stupid, but he says he’s my real dad?’

Laurel laughed lightly, trailing her fingers down the plait hanging over her right shoulder. ‘Spammers these days.’

It was barely there, but Seph saw the slight tremble in her mum’s hand. And what was that look that just flickered across her mum’s face? Unease unfurled its way down her spine, vertebra by vertebra as she handed the phone towards her mum. Laurel stared at the screen but didn’t reach out to take it.

‘Read the email, Mum.’

‘Why?’ She laughed again, but it sounded even hollower than it had the first time.

Seph held her gaze until Laurel took the phone with barely masked reluctance, and put it down on the table in front of her. She watched her mum intently as she read, noting the rise and fall of her shoulders as she breathed, the way her back remained rigid and upright in the chair despite the odd angle she had to tilt her head at to read the screen. When she needed to scroll down the email, Laurel touched the screen lightly and quickly, as if it were something that might sting.

‘There’s an attachment, too,’ Seph said.

She breathed quietly as her mum pressed the attachment icon and the image of a baby in the arms of an unknown man filled the screen. Seph sat perfectly still and waited for her mum to look back up at her, still hoping against all hopes that there was a perfectly decent explanation.

‘Mum?’

Laurel’s shoulders slumped. Seph didn’t need to see her face to know the words written in that email were true. Her deafening silence said it all. Her breath hitched in her throat, sending what felt like a battalion of tears to the back of her eyes, just waiting to fall like soldiers.

‘Mum? Is it true?’

Laurel put her hands over her face for a few seconds before dragging them down across her skin and bringing her palms together. She kept her eyes closed as she rested her fingers against her mouth and blew out a long, slow breath through pursed lips. She shook her head before slowly turning it into a nod.

‘Yes.’ Laurel opened her eyes, nodded again and dropped her hands into her lap. ‘It’s true.’

Seph’s eyebrows knitted together as her mum’s words hung in the air where they didn’t belong. ‘You’re kidding, right?’

It wouldn’t be the first time practical jokes had been made on unsuspecting recipients in their house, but it was usually her dad who’d make them, and it wasn’t April Fool’s Day. And, more importantly, this wasn’t in the slightest bit funny.

‘Right?’ Seph prompted with more urgency.

‘Seph, I…’ Laurel’s voice stopped at the sound of the front door opening and closing, and a second later, Tony burst through the archway to the dining room.

Seph looked at him, all smart in his dark suit, white shirt and yellow tie, and wished she could stop everything, right now. Why wasn’t there a big red button she could press to stop time, right this second, before everything fell apart? He was her dad, not some random guy called Nico who she’d never even heard of. Wasn’t he?

‘I know, I know, I’m late.’ Tony looked at her with an apologetic smile. ‘I’m sorry. The new IT system stalled and cocked everything up. Sorry. Happy birthday, darling.’

Seph froze as he kissed the side of her head, unable to reply. How could she? If this wasn’t a joke, then what her mum had just admitted to really was true and everything she thought she knew, was wrong. Her dad was Tony, a man her mum had once described as handsome, with strong family values and a kind heart. She’d said it was a combination that was rarer than a purple unicorn with three eyes. Seph had only been around nine years old at the time and remembered feeling proud that her dad was someone so special. Both of her parents were.

Laurel loved photography and Tony had a knack for languages, a combination that meant Seph’s childhood summer holidays were always spent abroad. Her parents were both strong advocates of fairness and equality. Her mum had had local photography exhibitions to raise money for Amnesty International, and her dad took a day off each month from his job as a financial consultant to help out at the Citizens’ Advice Bureau. Her upbringing had been a perfectly normal one, cushioned in the security of middle-class surroundings, worldwide travel and liberal left-wing ideals. There’d never once been a hint of anything untoward, any big secret that had been hidden for all these years.

Seph swallowed against the sickly lurching of her stomach when Tony kissed her mum hello. What was he going to say when he found out she’d lied to him, too? That he wasn’t really a father at all?

‘That’s some tan you’ve got,’ Tony said, sliding into the empty chair at the table. ‘Maybe we should take a hop to the south of France too. What do you say, Lorie? It’s been ages since we’ve been away.’ He turned to look at Laurel and his easy smile began to falter. His eyes flicked from Laurel’s to Seph’s and back again. ‘What’s going on?’

Seph’s breath almost stopped as her mum simply slid the phone towards him on the table. At least she wasn’t going to try and lie. She obviously knew that there were no words to save the situation unfolding in front of them. Seph’s eyes brimmed with tears again as Tony picked up the phone. After a few seconds his shoulders sagged, just like her mum’s had.

‘Oh.’ He said quietly and glanced at Laurel. ‘I see.’

‘I see?’ Seph repeated, shaking her head with a frown. ‘What does that mean?’

What was going on here? Why wasn’t his expression mirroring hers? Why didn’t it look like the face of a man who just found out that the daughter he’d raised wasn’t his?

‘Dad?’ She looked at him and slowly started to realise what was going on. ‘You already knew?’

Her words were barely a whisper, but Tony nodded.

‘Since when?’

‘I’ve always known, Seph.’ He looked at her grimly. ‘I’m sorry.’

She was sure the ground had just shifted beneath her. It couldn’t really be true, there was just no way. It was so ridiculously inconceivable that her brain hurt as it tried to fit things together in a struggle to comprehend what that email had really meant.

‘Are you seriously telling me that some random guy I don’t even know is my dad? That…’

The words disintegrated in her throat, and Seph got up from her chair. She needed to move, to pace, and try to make sense of all this. She shook her head again as she walked back and forth, trying to jolt herself back to the reality she knew. A reality where this place, the house she’d grown up in, in hadn’t been built on lies.

Everything around her looked the same as it had before. The table was still laden with the birthday meal that had now grown cold. The ever-present pile of fresh laundry waiting to be ironed was still sitting on the chair in the corner, relegated from its usual place on the table. Taro, their ancient tabby cat, was still curled up on the windowsill, apparently uninterested in the disruption in the lives of his humans.

Seph stopped pacing and stared at the ancient Barbie doll propped up against the bottle of champagne on the table. It had been her favourite doll. She’d clung to it on her sixth birthday, refusing to throw it away in favour of a new one. It had been special despite the missing arm, chewed leg, scribbled on skin and matted, chewing gum riddled hair. She’d declared it the Birthday Fairy, and her mum had made it a tradition to give it a guest appearance at every birthday since.

Seph’s stomach grew heavy as tears pulled at her eyes. How could there even be a family tradition if the family wasn’t real? She held onto the back of her chair and slowly sat back down.

‘Seph…I’m so sorry.’ Laurel’s voice sounded small, like it was coming from somewhere far away.

‘Who is he?’

‘Nico. Nico Papoulis. But you know that already, from his email.’

‘Papoulis? That’s what? Greek?’ she asked, and Laurel nodded. ‘I’m half-Greek?’

‘Yes. But you’re still Seph Powell. You’re still you,’ her mum replied.

How could she be? She’d always thought of herself as English. Her parents had joked that the only exotic blood in the family was from Tony’s grandmother who’d been born in Galway. They’d been to the Greek islands of Skiathos and Kefalonia on holiday when she’d been a little girl. It made no sense whatsoever that she’d been in the country where her heritage actually came from. In the space of just a few minutes, everything she thought she knew about her roots and self-identity had just been flipped upside down without any warning at all, and she had to squeeze her eyes shut for a second to get her mind to focus.

She looked her mum directly in the eye. ‘Were you together, or was it a one-night stand?’

With all this new information, she needed something about what she’d thought about herself to be true. She’d always believed she’d been borne out of love. She knew she hadn’t been planned - her mum was barely eighteen when she’d had her - but she suddenly needed reassurance that she’d come from something real.

‘No,’ Laurel said. ‘We were together.’

‘Did you love him?’

Seph watched as Laurel briefly looked at Tony before nodding. That was something, at least. A tiny space in her chest softened, opening with relief.

‘So what happened? Why have I never met him, or even heard about him?’

‘We were young and things didn’t work out.’ Laurel explained. ‘He left and never came back.’

‘So you just decided to never mention him and bring me up to believe that Dad…’ she looked at him with uncertainty, ‘that Tony’s my dad.’

‘He is. He raised you when Nico didn’t want to.’

Seph flinched at the words as if they’d physically hit her and her mum looked like she wished she could reach a hand out and snatch them back.

‘What I mean is,’ Laurel said, ‘that Tony has fathered you as if you were his own.’

‘But I’m not, am I?’

‘You are to me,’ Tony said. ‘We might not share the same DNA, but I’ve always considered you as my daughter, right from the start. I adopted you as soon as I could. You are my daughter.’

In words. On paper. She had a billion memories of him as her dad. But in reality? Seph shook her head. For the first time ever, she was the odd one out. They’d lied, building a charade for her to believe in, every day, every month, every year.

The tears she’d been trying to hold in fell from her eyes and she angrily wiped them away. ‘I can’t believe this. I can’t believe you’ve lied.’

‘We didn’t plan to, things just happened that way,’ Laurel replied. ‘It seemed like the natural thing to do to raise you how we did.’

Tony covered her hand with his. They were presenting themselves as a united front, an unbreakable team, just like they always had. Longing pulled in Seph’s heart for Ben, wishing he were there with her. She needed his warmth and reassurance, something tangible to hold onto to stop her from feeling like she’d suddenly found herself alone at sea.

‘He said he tried to contact me before. When?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t heard from him since the day he left.’

‘So he’s lying?’ Seph asked flatly.

‘Well, it wouldn’t be the first time,’ Laurel muttered under her breath.

‘He said he didn’t want to leave, that he had no choice. But you’re saying he left and never looked back. Something isn’t adding up here.’ Seph stared at her mum. ‘Was he violent or something? Some kind of criminal?’

‘No.’ Laurel shook her head. ‘At least, not that I know of.’

‘So why has he been erased from my life?’

‘We haven’t erased him, he erased himself.’

‘Why?’

Her mum sighed and took her hand from Tony’s. She crossed her arms, holding her elbows and shrugged. ‘I don’t know, Seph. He said he had bipolar disorder and couldn’t handle it but…’ She shrugged again and raised her eyebrows.

‘Bipolar disorder?’ Seph’s mind raced, trying to remember why she’d heard of it before, and exactly what it was.

Laurel nodded. ‘Apparently.’

‘You don’t believe it?’

Her mum shrugged again. ‘He never really had a great track record with the truth.’

Something in her mind clicked, and Seph found the memory she’d been looking for. ‘A girl in my class at school had bipolar. She just had to take some pills and she was fine. It’s not that big of a deal and it definitely doesn’t explain why you’ve kept him a secret all this time.’

‘It’s not just being moody, Seph. It’s a serious mental illness with manic highs and really bad, depressive lows,’ Tony explained. ‘It can be quite serious, not to mention dangerous.’

‘And it made life with him difficult, to say the least,’ Laurel added. ‘He’s not someone you should trust right off the bat, Seph. Anyone can write a heartfelt email but Nico is someone who doesn’t know what he wants. He never has. He’ll ruin your life, Seph. He can’t be trusted.’

‘But you can? You, the person who’s lied to me every single day of my life?’

Laurel looked crestfallen. ‘I only wanted to protect you.’

‘And what now?’ Seph shrugged, raising her palms. ‘You’ve lied to me for twenty-seven years to protect me from what? What could possibly be worse than this? Everything I thought I knew was a lie, and it turns out I don’t really have a clue about where I come from. What am I supposed to do with all this?’ Her voice cracked and she shook her head. ‘I need to get out of here.’

‘Please, Seph. We can talk about this.’

‘What else is there to talk about?’ She pushed her chair back. ‘I can’t listen to this anymore.’

‘You don’t have to go,’ Laurel said. ‘Why don’t you stay tonight? We can sort this out.’

Seph had considered it while she’d sat in the plane, biting her nails down with mounting anxiety. Why not? It had seemed better than going home to an empty house and spending the night alone. She’d always held the memory and idea of her childhood home so high in her mind. It made her feel safe. It was like a living, breathing thing that could wrap its arms around her and shield her from real life, and it had seemed like the logical thing to do as she’d flown over the Channel just a couple of hours ago. But things had changed, and now the country cottage didn’t feel like an old, welcoming friend. It felt cold, unfamiliar and strange. The last thing she wanted to do was sleep in her old room, surrounded by memories of a childhood that was based on lies.

Seph blinked away the tears in her eyes. She wished this whole conversation had never happened. She wished she’d have kept her phone on flight mode instead of opening her emails. She wished her mum had never lied, that she hadn’t just made a mockery of one of the core values she’d always stressed as being so important in one fell swoop.

Seph shook her head. The dining room had become claustrophobic and the air was cloying. She couldn’t face the idea of staying for one more minute. She bolted out of the chair, almost toppling it over in the process.

‘I’ve got to go, I can’t deal with this right now.’

She quickly left the dining room, hearing Tony telling Laurel to let her go. Her pulse thudded in her ears as she stood by the bottom of the stairs, shoving on her Converse with Taro circling her legs as if he could somehow entice her to stay. She picked up her bag, nudged him out of the way to stop him from running outside and slipped through the front door. As soon as she stepped outside, she choked on a sob and tried to ignore the feeling that she was losing another part of herself with every step she took.