Chapter 5: My Mother's Version
I drove to my mother's house alone.
Charles had followed me to the car park.
He'd said my name three times.
I hadn't turned around.
My mother was eighty-one.
She lived in the same house she'd lived in since 1979, in a quiet street with a low front gate that still squeaked the same way it had when I was a child.
She was in the garden when I arrived.
Deadheading roses.
She looked up when she heard the gate.
She smiled.
The smile faded when she saw my face.
"Evelyn."
I held up the consent form.
She set her secateurs down on the wall.
"Come inside," she said.
"I'm fine here."
She looked at the document.
Then she looked at me.
Something moved behind her eyes — not quite guilt, not quite relief.
Something older than both.
"How did you find it?"
"Mara's daughter found me."
My mother sat down on the garden bench.
Slowly.
Like the weight of the sentence had pressed her down.
"She p@ssed," my mother said.
"Mara.
A few years ago."
"I know.
I read her letter."
Silence.
"She thought I was de@d," I said.
"Someone told her I had p@ssed.
Was that you as well?"
My mother looked at her hands.
"I didn't know she was looking.
By the time I found out, your father was ill and I thought — I thought it was better if—"
"Better for who?"
"For you." She looked up.
"Evelyn, you were twenty-two years old.
You had no money.
Paul was unreliable.
You were barely holding yourself together.
I watched you after the birth.
You couldn't eat.
You couldn't sleep.
I thought if you knew she was alive and placed, you would spend your whole life trying to get her back and it would destroy you."
"So instead you destroyed me a different way."
"I kept you alive."
"You let me grieve a child who wasn't de@d." My voice finally broke on the last word.
"For thirty years, Mum.
Thirty years I thought she was gone.
I lit a candle for her every year on her birthday.
Did you know that?
Every single year."
My mother's face crumpled.
"I know," she whispered.
"You knew?"
"Charles told me.
Years later.
He said you still—" She pressed her hand to her mouth.
"And you said nothing."
She didn't answer.
A bird moved through the roses behind her.
The gate squeaked as a neighbor walked past on the pavement.
"I need to know one thing," I said.
"The consent form.
You signed my name.
That's fraud.
Did you know that when you did it?"
My mother straightened slightly.
"I spoke to someone.
A solicitor.
He said that in circumstances like those, a next of kin could—"
"That's not true.
That was never true.
You forged my signature."
She looked away.
"I need you to say it."
"Evelyn—"
"Say it."
A long pause.
The roses moved in the breeze.
"Yes," she said.
"I signed your name."
I folded the document and put it back in my bag.
"I'm not ready to talk to you yet," I said.
"I don't know when I will be."
I walked back to the gate.
"Evelyn." Her voice was thin behind me.
"I never stopped loving you.
Everything I did—"
"I know you love me." I didn't turn around.
May you like
"That's what makes it so hard to understand."
The gate squeaked shut behind me.
