The Secrets She Must Tell - Lucy King Page 0,52
the best he could but he wasn’t one for emoting either.’
Her eyebrows lifted. ‘You didn’t talk to anyone? A counsellor? A teacher?’
He shook his head. ‘No one. Not until the lid of the pressure cooker flew off when I was a teenager.’
‘What happened then?’
‘Nothing all that dramatic. I got into a couple of fights when I was sixteen. Spent a night in jail for being drunk and disorderly.’
‘And then you had therapy?’
‘Of a kind. The officer in charge that night asked what I was thought I was doing and it all came out. She gave me some good advice. The incident turned out to be a huge wake-up call. However, it turns out that internalising things is a hard habit to break.’
‘We all have our ways of coping.’
Yes, well, unlike hers, his weren’t working out so well. ‘Jim’s diagnosis was something else I didn’t talk about,’ he said, forcing himself to keep going because she needed to know everything in order to be able to help.
‘Did no one ask?’
‘Not many knew. I told the people who did that everything was fine.’
‘So how did you find out you were adopted?’
‘I was going through Jim’s papers after he died. The certificate was in a box that had been stored in the attic of his house.’
‘That must have been devastating.’
‘It was. I was in the middle of a full-blown identity crisis when you turned up with the news about Josh.’
‘No wonder you were so insistent on rescuing him. He’s your only flesh and blood.’
‘As far as I know.’
She frowned and gave a faint nod. ‘Right.’
Unable to bear the intensity of her scrutiny or suppress the restlessness whipping around inside him any longer, Finn pushed himself off the dressing table. ‘It’s been a disorientating time,’ he said, shoving his hands through his hair as he began to pace. ‘I feel as if I’ve been manipulated. As though everything about me has to be redefined and renegotiated. I’m thirty-one. It’s been tough trying to work out how much of my life has been real and how much a lie. I can’t figure out why Jim never said anything, especially after Alice died, and it’s been driving me mad.’
Georgie gave a loud sigh of what sounded like exasperation. ‘Oh, for the love of God, will you please stop calling them that?’ she said heatedly.
Stunned at her tone, wondering where the hell the sympathy he’d been expecting was, Finn came to an abrupt halt and whipped round to stare at her. ‘What?’
Her colour was high and her eyes were blazing and the need that suddenly streaked through him nearly knocked him off his feet. ‘Look, Finn, I get that you feel let down and betrayed. And, believe me, I know what it’s like to have your whole world turned upside down and your identity stripped away. But Jim and Alice were, to all intents and purposes, your parents.’
He ruthlessly quashed the desire and frowned at her, denial reeling through him. ‘I fail to see how.’
‘Biology doesn’t automatically grant parental rights,’ she said bluntly. ‘Nor does it guarantee the ability to parent successfully. Look at mine. They’re hardly an advert for parents of the year. They never gave a toss about me, not properly, and they still don’t. Carla’s looked out for me far more than they ever did. She’s the reason I was able to find you all those weeks ago. If she hadn’t made me send her a photo of you along with your name the night we met, things could have turned out very differently. You had two people who loved and cared for you. And, yes, then, tragically, only one, but nevertheless you had someone on your side for years, someone who by your own admission never failed to support and champion you when it mattered most. You honestly don’t know how lucky you were.’
‘What if my mother’s death wasn’t an accident?’ The question shot out of his mouth before he could stop it and he froze, every muscle in his body as taut as a bow string.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked carefully and he suddenly found himself on a knife edge.
He could easily deflect the question, he knew, but what would be the point of that? He needed her perspective and her insight into things he couldn’t make head or tail of, and that meant unlocking the doors on his greatest concerns and flinging them open, so he took a deep breath and said, ‘What if she killed herself deliberately because of