came again. A little piece of her narrative had been altered. Everything else in her mind fell away. She’d never known, she’d had no phone then, there had been no text messages, no nothing. Just a huge mess of misunderstanding. And now, a whole link in the chain she thought was broken was being fixed. A new understanding dawned on her. All she could remember were the days after she came home, the tears, twisting the hummingbird scarf round and round her hand, the smooth silk caressing her skin, sleeping with it next to her on the pillow. She’d asked him about the hummingbirds the day he gave it to her and he’d smiled. Not many people know this, he said, but their wings, they move in the symbol of the infinity sign. We’ll be together forever, Maddie. That’s what he’d said to her when he gave her the scarf. She could barely believe it. Maybe he’d been right all along. She looked up at him.
‘I know we’d said goodbye and you’d told me that it was OK, that we were both young, but I couldn’t let you go. That’s why I came back. Your mum was in, and you were upstairs.’
All these years… Maddie felt as if the air had gone from her lungs. But there had been no way of getting in touch. How could she have known?
‘Why didn’t you shout, let me know you were there? I had been crying myself to sleep all week after you left. I had—’ She stopped herself from telling Greg everything. Years of building up an impenetrable dam was hard to break. She had naturally buried all those feelings, pushed them further and further down inside her psyche so that they remained hidden behind the face that she put on for the world most of the time: the happy mum for Ed, the dutiful wife for Tim – look where that got you – and a good employee for the school, but the cracks were often there. She knew the signs: the late-night confessionals to Rachel, the drinking on her own when Tim was away, the heavy-hearted way she had felt on her wedding day. What had she been thinking? How had she survived the years of putting everyone first except herself. Why had she done it?
Because, her conscience mocked, when you’re twenty-one and pregnant and your parents are overwhelmingly disappointed in you and when you lose the only man you’ve loved, you go into emotional lockdown. You supress everything, because allowing those feelings to surface would be too dangerous – especially when no good can come of them, when you hit a roadblock.
Until now.
Greg was stroking her hair with one hand, pushing her wet fringe off her forehead. She could smell his familiar scent.
‘Your mother told me you’d been bleeding, Maddie, she said the baby was gone. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to see you, I wanted to hold you – badly. Maddie, you have to believe me.’ His eyes searched hers. ‘But your mother stood in the doorway and wouldn’t let me in. That look on her face…’
Her past was being rewritten – all those nights when she’d wondered how he could just walk away, and yet she’d forgiven him for it. She had come to terms with it, but it had taken a long time, and all that time, he had come back… She was taking short, shallow breaths, unable to comprehend.
‘She told me to go, Maddie. She said—’ his voice caught in his throat ‘—to me, “Haven’t you done enough damage already?”’ He dropped his hands from Maddie and put them in his lap. ‘I felt so ashamed.’
‘She said that to you?’
He nodded slightly. ‘It was the way she looked at me, Maddie. I swear, you have to believe me. Nobody had ever looked at me with such disgust before. Not like that. She hated me, standing on that doorstep. She told me I’d ruined her little girl, that I’d let myself down, I’d let you down, I’d let the whole family down.’
‘We’d both let each other down, but… I didn’t know any of this, Greg. I just—’
He came back.
She didn’t know what to feel. She was dizzy. She wanted to explain the whole story. There was more to explain, but she couldn’t, as not only were a thousand sparks flying in her chest, she couldn’t speak because Greg’s mouth was pressing down on hers as his hand rested on her shoulder blade and