The Secret Seaside Escape - Heidi Swain Page 0,112
longer the self-assured boss who never let his confident façade falter, he looked far more human now and vulnerable. As he appeared to be finally facing up to what he had done, admitting that he had been an unfaithful and disloyal husband, I supposed that was only to be expected.
He nodded.
‘You know why I couldn’t bear the sight of you a moment longer . . .’ I choked, the bitter words catching in my throat as my eyes filled with tears.
The last thing I wanted to do was cry in front of him, but now we were here, with the awful evidence on the table between us, I couldn’t stop the sudden influx of emotions.
‘Me?’ Dad asked, the shocked tone of his voice making me look up again.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘you. You were the one who used to moan about the sort of woman Mum had turned into. You were the one who resented the amount of money she spent on clothes and the fact that she was so obsessed with always looking her best, but,’ I added, jabbing a finger at the printed page, ‘did you ever stop to think about why she did all that?’
I didn’t give him a chance to answer.
‘She did it,’ I charged on, ‘because she was trying to put a brave face on things. She didn’t want the rest of the world knowing that she was crumbling inside because of your endless affairs, so she made the outside of herself as beautiful and groomed as she possibly could. She invested in all those designer outfits,’ I raged, ‘because—’
‘Because,’ Dad interrupted, reaching for my hand before I could move it out of his reach, ‘the woman who owned her favourite boutique was your mother’s lover, and your mum used her shopping habit as an excuse to spend time with her.’
The silence which descended was so complete, so deep, I was sure I could hear waves lapping the shore, even though the tide was out. Or was the rushing sound just in my head? It seemed to fill the spaces in and around me and was accompanied by a sudden light-headedness which before had heralded the arrival of a vertigo attack.
‘What?’ I croaked.
‘I’m sorry to just blurt it out like that, Tess,’ Dad said as he squeezed my hand harder and everything began to look fuzzy around the edges, ‘but it wasn’t pages from your mum’s diary that you found. They were from mine.’
I closed my eyes, but that didn’t help stave off the spinning sensation and I slowly, very slowly, opened them again.
‘You’ve been reading my reaction to your mother’s affairs,’ he said, ‘not her reaction to mine.’
The expression in his eyes and the set of his mouth suggested he was telling the truth, but surely that couldn’t be right.
‘But Mum wasn’t a lesbian,’ I finally whispered, ‘she was married to you. She had me . . . and the way the diary was worded . . .’
‘She was,’ he whispered back. ‘I know it’s hard to get your head around Tess, but your mum was gay. Throughout the early years of our marriage, she did everything she could to make herself believe that she wasn’t, but she was and, in the end, she gave up trying to pretend otherwise.’
‘But the diary,’ I stammered.
‘I had to be careful how I wrote it,’ he explained, ‘I wanted, needed, to get my feelings out of my head but knew a book could be found and a computer could be hacked, so in the end I settled for trying to make it read as if . . .’
‘A woman had written it,’ I interrupted, ‘you messed around with the pronouns and that’s what made me think that Mum had written it.’
‘Yes,’ he nodded.
He’d almost succeeded too, but now I realized that was why a few things hadn’t quite added up, no matter how many times I read them. That was why the words hadn’t always scanned quite as seamlessly as they should.
‘I see,’ I whispered, even though I was struggling to. Dad then explained that it was Mum who had been the adulterous one in their marriage, not him. She had had numerous affairs over the years and they had all been with women.
‘But the final one,’ he said, sighing deeply. ‘That was different.’
‘You wrote that she was “the one”, didn’t you?’ I interrupted.