The Lies We Told by Camilla Way (best book recommendations txt) 📕

other of their faces. “We got on with our lives. What else could we do? The police had rightly concluded Nadia’s death was suicide, assuming she’d died alone, and that . . . that . . . Lana had been lost to sea.” She looked at Tom. “And later, when first you, then your brother came along, we just wanted to put the whole dreadful business behind us.” She paused, seeming to shrink inside herself as she said in a low, fearful voice, “It wasn’t until seven years later that Beth suddenly contacted me out of the blue.”

“What did she want?” Clara asked.

“She was hysterical, saying she wanted to go to the police, that we needed to confess everything. It was a horrible shock, as you can imagine. I had no idea why she was suddenly so upset. I tried to get her to calm down, but she became so worked up that in the end I agreed to meet her. When I got there, she was still in a state, saying Hannah, as they’d named Lana, had become violent, that she was frightened of her. She said the child had started a fire at her babysitter’s, had hurt her son, that her marriage was falling apart because of it all. She believed Hannah was mentally ill—that she’d inherited her mother’s psychiatric issues—and that now she—Beth—was somehow being punished for deceiving everyone the way we did. I tried to reason with her, but she was beside herself, saying she wanted to go to the police, that she couldn’t stand the guilt anymore and wanted to confess that they’d taken the child illegally. She kept talking about how Nadia had died, how wrong it had been to pass Hannah off as their own. Most of all, she believed Hannah needed professional help, that doctors would need her real medical history. The more I tried to talk her out of it, the more upset she became. I decided that the best thing for me to do was to leave. And I told her not to contact me again.”

There was complete silence. Clara looked across the room to Oliver, who was still slumped in a chair, his head in his hands as his wife talked.

“I thought,” Rose continued, “or rather I hoped very much that would be an end to it. But it wasn’t, of course.” She looked up and met Clara’s eye suddenly. “Because Hannah had been there all along, in the kitchen where we were talking, was hiding in the next room, listening to our conversation. She had heard everything Beth and I said. She was seven years old and she knew everything—who her real parents were, how her mother had died. Everything.”

Clara put her hand to her mouth. “Oh my God, that poor kid.”

Rose glanced at her with the smallest flicker of confusion, almost, Clara thought, as if Hannah’s suffering hadn’t occurred to her in all of this. “I didn’t find out for many years that Hannah had overheard us, not until I saw Beth again,” she went on, “and by then it was far too late. In the meantime she grew up, becoming more and more disturbed, fixated on what she’d learned. She knew the hospital Beth used to work in and managed to track me down there. She became obsessed with Oliver and me, with all of us—her ‘real’ family, as she thought of us by then. After a while she began to skip school, getting the train over here and following Oliver to work, or standing outside the children’s school, becoming more and more resentful.” She turned to Tom. “She saw you kids as having the perfect life, the life that she should be living.”

“Didn’t you confront her?” Tom asked angrily. “Talk to her?”

“We didn’t know!” Rose cried. “Even Beth had no idea until years later. Hannah always kept her distance, never approaching us or letting herself be discovered. We had no clue that she even knew about us! And then, when she was sixteen and Emily had just turned eighteen, she engineered a way for the two of them to meet. They became friends.”

“And you still had no idea who she was?” Clara asked.

“No! She told Emily her name was Becky, and she never came here to the house, not that I’d recognize her if she did. We knew Emily had a new friend, but I didn’t make the connection. Why would I? The Jenningses lived miles from us in Cambridgeshire. I had no idea Hannah knew about us all. I had no reason to suspect.”

“So how did you find out?” Mac asked.

At this, Rose began to cry again. “One night Hannah told Emily herself. She told her everything. Who she really was. That Oliver was her father, that she and Emily were half sisters, that we’d given her away to near strangers to be rid of her.”

“My God,” Tom said.

“But it was worse than that. Hannah knew I’d been the only person present when her mother died, and over the years she had convinced herself that it was I who killed her, that I’d pushed her!”

“And Emily believed her?” Tom asked.

Rose wiped her eyes. “I don’t think so, thank God. I told her it wasn’t true, of course, that I’d seen Nadia jump, but it didn’t stop her being furious with both of us. Furious that Oliver had had an affair, that we had kept from her that she had a half sister, that I’d ‘covered up’ for her dad. She said we disgusted her, that she’d never forgive us. You know what she was like, how principled she was, so sure of what was right and wrong. There was nothing we could say to make her stay—she was such a stubborn, headstrong girl. She said that she was leaving, that she never wanted to see us again. What could I do? She was eighteen! I couldn’t force her to stay!”

“So you just let her go?” Tom said.

Rose looked at him imploringly. “Oh, darling, she was so very angry with us.