The Happy Family by Jackie Kabler (electric book reader txt) 📕

I know exactly what happened. And yes, I did let her in. I didn’t know she was your mother, not until a few minutes later, not until she told me. But I let her in because I knew who she was. As in, I recognised her. She wasn’t a stranger.’

‘You … you recognised her? What do you mean you recognised her?’

I’m starting to feel dizzy, spots dancing before my eyes. She sighs again. Her voice is weakening; it is barely audible.

‘I mean, Beth, that I knew who she was. Or who she’s been saying she is, anyway. Your mother is someone you already know. Someone you’ve known for a while, actually. I’m not surprised you didn’t recognise her, I suppose. I certainly didn’t – she looks very different these days from the photos I’ve seen of her from back in the day. And I have no idea why she hasn’t told you who she is. But you know what, I’m not going to tell you who she is either. I’m going to let you work that one out for yourself.’

Chapter 40

‘I can’t take this in. I just can’t. It gets more bizarre by the day.’

Jacob shakes his head and takes another slurp of his coffee, and Crystal, who’s sitting next to me while he paces up and down the kitchen, looks at me incredulously.

‘It really does. You should write a book, Beth.’

‘Hmmm. Well, I’m hoping I’ll be able to go back to work soon now. But if that doesn’t pan out, maybe!’

I laugh, and she does too. It’s the Sunday morning of the most extraordinary weekend of my life, a weekend during which I seem to have experienced every possible emotion from terror and despair to utter bewilderment. But now I’m feeling … OK. I’m still struggling to process the scale of Alison Allen’s deception, and my own naiveness in falling for it, of course. Why I didn’t even think to question her identity when she first arrived is something that will haunt me for a long time. But now that I know what’s really been going on over the past couple of months, that I’m not, after all, delusional or having some sort of breakdown, the relief is overwhelming. And already, my life has taken a turn for the better. The children are home, both of them upstairs now and settling back into their bedrooms. They are calling to each other across the landing, the sound of their giggles floating down to where we’re sitting and it makes my spirits soar.

‘It’s time they came back,’ Jacob said when they arrived this morning. ‘And I’m sorry, Beth. I should have trusted you. I should have realised something wasn’t right …’

‘Shh, it’s fine. I’m just so thrilled to see them,’ I said.

He’s done his best to explain things to Eloise and Finley, without going into too much detail; that the lady they thought was their grandmother was actually somebody else, trying to hurt Mummy because of something that happened a very long time ago. Amazingly, they seem to have accepted that for now, although I suspect Eloise will have some questions when she’s had time to settle back in and think about things a little more. She appears to have forgiven me though, for all the things she was so mad at me about. The hugs they both gave me in the hallway earlier were long and warm, and as I wrapped my arms around them and kissed their beautiful faces, I thought my heart might burst. My babies, home again.

I’ve spent the past hour chatting to Jacob and Crystal, filling them in about all I’ve learned. After Alison’s remarkable revelation that her attacker, my biological mother – how the hell? – was someone she already knew, she’d refused to say another word. She’d closed her eyes and her breathing had become shallow. I’d stood there staring at her for a full minute, my mind racing, my heart juddering. Then I called the nurse, picked up my bag, and left. On the way home I left another message for Liv, this time telling her I knew the truth, who she was and who Alison was, and told her to come and get her mother. It was over. Over. All of it.

I didn’t call anyone else last night. Instead I came home, made a mug of tea and sat in the lounge, looking out at the darkening sky, thinking. And then I went to bed and amazingly, managed to sleep. I was physically and mentally exhausted after a day and a night at the hospital and the astonishing events of the past twenty-four hours. But my dreams were vivid and plentiful, plagued by visions of a faceless woman brandishing a lamp and peering in through my window. When I woke I remembered the times I’d thought I’d seen a real face outside my window, and lay there in the half-light of dawn, wondering. I’d asked Alison about that yesterday, and she’d shrugged.

‘That was nothing to do with me,’ she said. ‘Still think you were seeing things.’

And so the question of who’d been lurking outside the house remained unanswered, for now. Weirdly, I believed everything she’d told me yesterday, for what did she have to gain by lying now? She’d done what she’d set out to do, and now she was dying. There was no point in lying anymore. Oh, she’d enjoyed it though, hadn’t she, that last brief conversation? She’d enjoyed leaving me with this one final mystery. But the deal we’d made had been a single tiny kindness: I make no complaint about her to the police, and in return she gives me the chance to find my mother before they do.

What Alison had said had sounded ludicrous, impossible. How could my mother be someone I already knew, someone I’d already ‘let into my life’, as she put it? And yet, as she’d also kindly pointed out, she’d managed to fool me pretty easily. Was it so far-fetched to