Saving Wishes (The Wishes Series) (33 page)

It took longer for him to reply. “I can’t do that, Charli.”

“You have to, Alex,” I demanded. “I remember things. I know it’s not true.”

I could feel his hand trembling on my cheek. “The woman you remember was my mother, not yours. You’re
my
daughter.” His voice cracked with under the weight of his confession.

I pulled away, suddenly unable to draw enough oxygen out of the air. Alex pushed me forward, rubbing my back as I rested my head between my knees. I was dying.

“No,” I whimpered.

“It’s true, Charli.”

“No,” I repeated, sounding no stronger than before.

“I was only seventeen when you were born. Your mum’s name is Olivia. She was seventeen too. You were born in Sydney.” He rattled the information quickly. It was like he wanted to state as many facts as he could before I got up and ran away. If my legs had been functioning, I would have.

I couldn’t believe him. My whole life had been a lie. I couldn’t bear to hear any more. I covered my ears with my hands, pleading with him to stop.

“It’s the truth, Charli,” he groaned.

I found the strength to break his hold. “I will never believe a thing you tell me for the rest of my life.”

Alex was on his feet before I’d finished. He grabbed me by the wrist and roughly led me to the front door while he fumbled for the key. Once inside, he strode down the hallway, dragging me behind him. In the spare bedroom was the filing cabinet, and he dropped my arm to rifle through it. I rubbed my wrist as if he’d hurt me. If he thought he had, he ignored it. Finally he thrust a piece of paper at me.

“Read it,” he demanded.

It was my birth certificate.

I couldn’t deny it any longer. Even blocking my ears, closing my eyes and singing loudly couldn’t drown out the fact that I was indeed the daughter of Alex Blake and Olivia Fielding.

I slammed it into his chest. “I won’t hear it from you. I don’t ever want to hear another thing from you!”

Alex looked devastated. “Then go to Floss,” he said, defeated. “She knows everything.”

I glared at him as I backed away, and left the house without another word.

***

Floss and Norm lived in the centre of town, one street back from the Lawson’s. Floss was waiting for me on the porch, so Alex must have warned her. I ran across the lawn, throwing myself into her arms.

“Hello, love,” she said, hugging me tightly. “Let’s go inside and make some tea.”

I clung to her as we walked through the small front room into the tiny kitchen. “Alex is my father,” I blurted.

“I know, love,” she said, like it wasn’t all bad.

I surprised myself by crying. I thought I was all cried out. Floss passed me a big box of tissues and I grabbed a wad.

“Donna Blake was Alex’s mum. She was a good friend of mine. I’d known her for years but I hadn’t seen her since Alex was a boy,” she explained. “One day she turned up on my doorstep, all the way from Sydney with a tiny baby, just a few months old.”

“Where was Alex?”

“Working up north on a fishing boat. I didn’t think much of it at the time. He was a young man. It made sense for him to be out on his own,” she said, shrugging. “She said that the baby was her daughter, but something wasn’t right.”

“Why?”

“Donna had her demons,” she said gently. “She was a big drinker. I knew after just a few days that it had completely taken over her life. You were perfect in every way, certainly not the product of an alcoholic mother.”

“Alex left me with her?” I asked, horrified at his carelessness.

“No,” she replied emphatically. “Your mother relinquished custody to Alex when you were born. He was going it alone and struggling financially. He was offered a week of work and he had to take it, leaving you with Donna.” I scowled at the table, pretending to dab my eyes with the tissues to hide my disgust. Floss laid her hand on mine. “He was desperate, Charli. He had no idea she packed you up and brought you here. When the poor boy got home, you were gone. For nearly a month he had no idea where you were.”

“How did he find me?”

“I tracked him down.” She paused. “He arrived in town the very next day.”

“Why didn’t he set the record straight? Why didn’t he just tell people I was his?”

Floss sighed. “Donna was his mother. She’d created this huge fairy-tale about you, telling a million lies. Alex never knew his father, not even his name. He felt protective of his mum – even after what she’d done. So he went along with it, settling in as best he could on the pretence of being your brother. I took care of you during the day so Alex could work. Donna slipped deeper into drink. Alex was forever dragging her out of the pub, paying her debts, enduring her antics.”

“That’s so awful,” I gulped

“She was his mother, Charli,” Floss said tenderly. “He looked after her for years, hoping that she’d eventually conquer the drink.”

“But she never did,” I guessed.

Floss’s eyes were shiny with tears. “She went on a huge bender one day and just went to sleep. She had a massive stroke. She was just forty-one,” she said, sounding puzzled, like she still had trouble wrapping her head around it.

The hazy recollections of the woman who sang to me were of my grandmother. I’d remembered nursery rhymes and lullabies – not drunken tunes crooned at ten in the morning. How had I got it so wrong? Poor Alex never had a chance.

“Life got much better for the two of you after that. He scraped enough money together to buy the café. A year later he bought the house. He never intentionally lied to you, love. He’s been fighting for you since the day you were born. I hope you can see that.”

“What happened to my mother?
Who
is my mother?”

“I don’t know. You’re going to have to ask Alex.”

I groaned. It was all too hard.

Floss leaned over. “I’ve seen what that man has endured over the years, Charli. Anything less than total understanding from you will not be tolerated. Do you understand?”

“Would taking a few days out to get my head around it all be tolerable?” My voice was tiny, implying I was scared of her. Perhaps I was.

“Yes, love,” she said kindly, squeezing my hand.

***

The Décarie house was in darkness. Considering the late hour, I wasn’t surprised. If I had been thinking straight I would have gone home to bed, waiting until morning to see Adam. But I wasn’t thinking straight. Part of me doubted that I’d ever be capable of lucid thoughts again.

I wasn’t too jumbled to know that knocking on the front door would be a mistake. Dealing with Gabrielle could wait. The knowledge that she’d transitioned from a Parisienne witch to my stepmother was cringe-worthy. I remembered overhearing Alex tell Adam that Gabrielle knew everything about him. I wondered if that included his early admission to parenthood at seventeen.

Adam’s window slid open easier than expected. Climbing through it was easy, probably because I’d done it before.

The sheer curtains meant that even at night the room was never completely dark. I could see him lying completely motionless, so I knew he was awake. He never stopped tossing and turning in his sleep.

He threw back the covers and patted the space beside him.

I kicked off my shoes and crawled into his waiting arms, fighting back tears. “I have so much to tell you.”

He kissed the top of my head. “It can wait,” he soothed.

Being with him brought instant relief. I didn’t have to listen and I didn’t have to explain. Lying in the arms of the very best thing in my life was exactly where I needed to be. I had found my new safe place.

Four days passed before I even contemplated going home. Gabrielle, who was spending more time at our house than at her own, kept Alex in the loop.

“He misses you, Charli,” she told me over and over. The pressure from her was subtle but constant.

I wasn’t a complete monster. I knew Alex was hurting – I was just tragically inept to deal with it.

School had become an unlikely escape. No one there knew of the turmoil I was going through at home, and the thought of the Beautifuls catching wind of it made my stomach turn. Thankfully, torturing me wasn’t high on their list of priorities that week. All talk was of the gala event they were planning. The guest list had ballooned to include just about everyone in town, except me.

Confiding in Nicole was a given. I’d never kept anything from her, but pinning her down long enough to break the news proved difficult. Her romance with Ethan was consuming her – and it wasn’t attractive. She cut more classes than she attended, to spend time with him. Far from discouraging her, Ethan parked down the street from the school, waiting to pick her up. Nicole dropped everything the minute her phone rang. Ethan Williams was starting to irritate me.

“Nic,” I called, trotting to catch up with her as she moseyed towards the art room.

She turned and stopped walking, but didn’t stop tapping away at her phone. “Where‘ve you been?” she asked, only half paying attention.

“Around. Where have you been?”

“I’ve been busy, really busy,” she said, grinning at her phone.

“How is Ethan?” I asked dryly.

She shoved her phone in her pocket and finally looked at me. “Everything is going exactly to plan. He’s lovely.”

I wanted to be happy for her but an uneasy feeling niggled at me. I wondered if I was jealous. Nicole was doing nothing that I hadn’t done since Adam arrived in town. But I loved him. Nicole had always considered Ethan more of a hobby.

The bell sounded and the corridor suddenly became deserted.

“I really need to talk to you,” I told her, glancing to make sure the coast was clear.

“What?”

I drew in a long breath, wondering how I could get through the soap opera that had become my life. Short, fractured sentences were the best I could muster.

Nicole stared at me, wide-eyed, long after I stopped talking.

“Say something,” I urged.

“Tell me again,” she said, struggling to speak.

“Alex is my father,” I replied, breaking it down for her.

Her expression was appalled. “Since when?”

“Since birth, presumably,” I snarled.

“Wow, Charli. What a freak show.”

“Thanks for your support.” My tone did nothing to mask my hurt.

I turned to walk away but Nicole grabbed the hood of my jacket, pulling me back. “I didn’t mean it like that – it’s just… weird.”

I shrugged her off. I had just told her the biggest news of my life and my best friend found it weird.

“It’s not weird, it’s my life,” I hissed.

“I guess that explains why Alex has been acting so strangely all week,” she mused, still ignoring the bigger picture. “I thought it was because I’d quit.”

“You quit?”

“It was taking up too much time.”

“Nic, we’re supposed to be saving money. We’re leaving in a few months,” I scolded.

She shrugged. “Adam is giving us the money from the boat. That’s more money than we’d ever earn selling postcards and working at the café. Ethan said it’s probably worth twenty grand.”

The girl in front of me was no one I knew. Her words revolted me. Adam had worked on the boat day and night for weeks. I’d never felt comfortable with him gifting me the proceeds when it was sold. While it was true that we were pooling all our money, Nicole claiming a stake in the proceeds of his boat was a stretch by any measure.

She didn’t notice my growing fury. “We can go anywhere with that kind of money, Indonesia, Fiji, Africa…”

In all the years we’d been planning our trip, Africa had never rated a mention. Alex had a list of no-go zones. Africa was one of them, along with a zillion other places he deemed unsafe for two girls travelling alone. The ideas spewing out of Nicole’s mouth were not her own. And I knew who had put them there.

I knew that Mitchell and Ethan would breeze out of town as quickly as they’d arrived. All I had to do was ride out Nicole’s abominable behaviour until then. Even if she was foolish enough to invite Ethan to tag along on our trip, he wouldn’t wait that long. We were stuck in the Cove for another four months.

The ride home from school that day wasn’t the usual leisurely drive. Adam just pushed the passenger door open for me rather than getting out to open it.

“Where’s the fire?” I teased, slipping into the seat.

“No fire,” he replied. “I have to get back to meet Norm at four. He’s coming to check out the boat.”

“So it’s done?” I asked, excited that he had finally finished it.

“Completely, even the name. Gabi painted it on for me.”

Norm was waiting when we got there, his ancient station wagon parked right in front of the shed, so close that we had to squeeze past it to get in the door. “Well, isn’t she a beaut?” he announced, sweeping his hand along the hull.

I had to admit, Adam had done brilliantly. The boat was far from ugly now. The wood was smooth and freshly painted royal blue. The exposed wood on the deck gleamed under new varnish, and her name was written in white letters across the stern.