He looked dreadful, as if he hadn’t slept. “I think you’ve said enough, don’t you?” But the soft pink eyes that spoke of shame and guilt forced her to listen as they shared the return journey. All the while he spoke, she thought about Tom’s little wishes left on her doorstep for years, wishes she had on occasion almost discarded.
“Please let us try again,” he said as the train pulled into Penzance station. “If not for me, then for Kate.”
All along she’d thought Tom had abandoned her, yet he had no idea about the baby and had left because of James’s lies. And the previous year’s wish had been for them to raise a family together. A horrible, painful coincidence. “I think you’d better move out when we get home,” she replied. “This charade has gone on quite long enough.”
* * *
Mrs. Clements danced around the subject of James’s departure for well over a week, hoping to ascertain what had happened. Elizabeth decided the best way forward was to focus her attentions on something that she could control, so she set about painting the commissioned piece for Shelby Summerton, and was rewarded with a handsome royalty a little over two months later. The sale earned her enough capital that she could leave the family home and move into one of her own. Mr. Bolitho was reluctant at first, but she convinced him to let her buy the still vacant cottage that had once been home to Tom and his family. James helped her with the move, said it was the least he could do, and Elizabeth let him, on account that she wanted Kate to see the only parents she had ever known working things through.
But she also knew that the truth had to come out before Kate got any older. In his continuing pains to make amends, James drove her to Tremayne’s farm in the hope she might find Tom. They pulled up in a muddy patch of land, straw and rain ripe with the smell of manure. James stayed in the car, but Elizabeth rang the bell with the swell of hope tight in her chest. It was short-lived; the Hales had gone missing along with a stash of smuggled whiskey and tobacco not a month after they arrived.
“Never saw Tom in my life,” the farmer’s wife said, hoisting up a skirt unsuitable for the manual labor her hands suggested she did. “But I heard he took up a driving job in London.” Elizabeth returned to Porthsennen with the address of a forklift firm and renewed resolve that she was on the right track.
It took another year of joining loose ends before she found herself in an architect’s office, the walls covered with wood paneling, the ceiling grimy and smoke-yellow. It was almost a dead end, Tom long gone, but they gave her his home address and wished her luck. From there she rode the sweaty Tube from Richmond to Hampstead, exiting into brilliant sunshine. Although she wasn’t certain about the route, she did her best to follow the map she picked up in the train station, and eventually she found herself standing outside the house she had been told was his.
Her first thought was that it was a pretty place, flowers creeping up the front, a square patch of lawn that she could imagine Tom mowing. Life, lived. The nausea of nerves rumbled in her stomach, so she took a seat on a bench on the opposite side of the road. It was facing away from the house, overlooking the overgrown perimeter of Hampstead Heath. Just a moment, that was all she needed, to think about what it might be that she was going to say. After all, it wasn’t every day you were reunited with the only man you had ever truly loved after almost a decade of absence. Should she start with hello? An apology? A big toothy smile? No, she thought, not that one; her tea habit ensured that her teeth weren’t that white anymore, a conclusion that at least helped to narrow down the options.
Just as she was getting up, dusting off her legs, she heard a woman’s voice calling Tom’s name. And the strange thing was the familiarity it aroused, the trill of it stirring a certainty that she had heard the voice before. Gazing over her shoulder, turning just enough to see, she saw Shelby Summerton standing at the front gate. “Tom,” she said again, calling into the open front door.