The Lies We Told by Camilla Way (epub read online books .txt) 📗

I’m coming for you Luke, I’ll be seeing you.

It had been a woman, all this time? And he’d known about it for months, had known but hadn’t told her—had never even mentioned the e-mails. Did he know who it was? It was clearly someone who knew him very well—knew his parents’ names, where Luke worked; knew his movements intimately. Was it the same person who had broken into their flat, sent the photographs, the letters? Perhaps it was a joke, she thought wildly. An elaborate prank dreamed up by one of his friends. But then, where was he? Where was Luke? I’m coming for you Luke, I’ll be seeing you.

She was deep in thought when the sound of her intercom sliced through the silence, making her jump violently, her heart shooting to her mouth.

THREE

CAMBRIDGESHIRE, 1989

We waited such a long time for a baby. Years and years, actually. They couldn’t tell us why, the specialists. Couldn’t find a single reason why it didn’t happen for Doug and me. “Unexplained infertility” was the best they could come up with. You think it’s going to be so simple, starting a family, and then when it’s taken from you, the future you’d imagined snatched away, it feels like a death. All I ever wanted was to be a mum. When school friends went off to university or found themselves jobs down in London, I knew it wasn’t for me. I didn’t want to be a career woman, didn’t need a big house and lots of money. I was content with our little cottage in the village I’d grown up in, Doug’s building business; I just wanted children, and Doug felt exactly the same way.

I used to see them when they came back to our village for holidays, those old classmates of mine. And I’d see how they looked at me, with my clothes from the market and my lack of ambition, see the flash of superiority or bewilderment in their eyes when they realized I didn’t want to be exactly like them. But I didn’t care. I knew that what I wanted would bring me all the happiness I’d need.

And then, year by year, woman by woman, things began to change. They began to change. As we all neared our thirties, baby after baby began to make its appearance on those weekend visits. Of course, I’d been trying for a good few years by then, had already had many, many months of disappointment to swallow, but nothing hit me quite as hard as seeing that endless parade of children of the girls I used to go to school with.

Because I could see it in their faces, how it changed them. How overnight the nice clothes and interesting careers and successful husbands that had once defined them became suddenly second place to what they now had. It wasn’t the change in them physically, the milk-stained clothes or the tired faces; it wasn’t the harassed air of responsibility or the membership in a new club or even the obvious devotion they felt. It was something I saw in their eyes—a new awareness, I suppose—that hurt me most. It seemed to me as though they’d crossed into another dimension where life was fulfilling and meaningful on a level I could never understand. And the jealousy and despair I felt was devastating. Plenty of women, I knew, were happily child free, led perfectly satisfying lives without kids in them, but I wasn’t one of them. From as long as I could remember, having a family of my own was all I’d dreamed of.

So when finally, finally, our miracle happened, it was the most amazing, most joyful thing imaginable. That moment when I held Hannah in my arms for the first time was one of pure elation. We loved her so much, Doug and I, right from the beginning. We had sacrificed so much, and waited such a long time for her, such a horribly long time.

I don’t remember exactly when the first niggling doubts began to stir. I couldn’t admit it to myself at first. I put it down to my tiredness, the shock and stress of new motherhood, or a hundred other different things rather than admit the truth. I didn’t let on to anyone how worried I was. How frightened. I told myself that she was healthy and she was beautiful and she was ours, and that was all that mattered.

And yet, I knew. Somehow I knew even then that there was something not quite right about my daughter. An instinct, of the purest, truest kind, in the way animals sense trouble in their midst. Secretly I would compare her with other babies—at the clinic, or at Mother and Baby clubs, or at the supermarket. I would watch their expressions, their reactions, the ever-changing emotions in their little faces, and then I’d look into Hannah’s beautiful big brown eyes and I’d see nothing there. Intelligence, yes—I never feared for her intellect—but rarely emotion. I never felt anything from her. Though I lavished love upon her, it was as though it couldn’t reach her, slipping and sliding across the surface of her like water over oilskin.

At first, when I finally voiced my concerns to Doug, he’d cheerfully brush them aside. “She’s just chilled out, that’s all,” he’d say. “Let her be, love.” And I’d allow myself to be reassured, telling myself he was right, that Hannah was fine and my fears were all in my head. But when she was almost three years old, something happened that even Doug couldn’t ignore.

I was preparing breakfast in the kitchen while she sat on the floor, playing with a makeshift drum kit of pots and pans and spoons I’d got out to entertain her with. She was hitting one pan repeatedly over and over, the sound ricocheting inside my skull, but just as I was mentally kicking myself for giving them to her, the noise suddenly stopped. “Hannah want