Sarah Mayberry - Hot Island Nights

“Elizabeth. I was wondering when you’d get home,” Martin said.

Her fiancé stood and approached to kiss her, his gray eyes crinkling at the corners as he smiled. As usual he was dressed immaculately in a tailored three-piece suit and conservatively striped silk tie, his dark hair parted neatly.

Instead of offering her mouth for his kiss, she thrust the certificate at him.

“Look. They’ve made a mistake. They’ve got my father’s name wrong on my birth certificate.”

For a split second Martin stilled. Then he shot her grandfather a quick, indecipherable look before turning his attention to the birth certificate.

“I thought you were going to have this delivered to the office so I could take care of the marriage license.” Martin spoke mildly, but there was an undercurrent of tension in his voice.

Elizabeth looked at him, then at her grandfather’s carefully blank face, and she knew.

It wasn’t a mistake.

“What’s going on?” Her voice sounded strange, wobbly and high.

“Why don’t you have a seat, Elizabeth?” her grandfather suggested.

She allowed herself to be ushered into one of the buttonback leather chairs facing the formidable mahogany desk. Her grandfather waited until Martin had taken the other seat before speaking.

“There is no mistake, I’m afraid. The man you know as your father, John Mason, was actually your stepfather. He married your mother when you were two years old.”

For a moment there was nothing but the sound of the clock ticking. Elizabeth started to speak, then stopped because she had no idea what to say.

She’d been devastated by her parents’ deaths when she was seven years old. For the first few months she’d lived with her grandparents she’d cried herself to sleep every night. She treasured the small mementos she had of her childhood—the vintage Steiff teddy bear her parents had given her when she was four, the rock fossils they’d found together on a family holiday, the empty perfume bottle that had once held her mother’s favorite scent.

But now her grandfather was telling her that her parents weren’t both dead, that it was her stepfather who’d died. That her real father—the stranger whose name was listed on her birth certificate—might still be alive and well somewhere in the world.

“Why has no one ever told me this before?”

“Because it wasn’t necessary. I won’t go into details, but Sam Blackwell is not someone we want involved in your life. John Mason was your father in every other way, so we didn’t see the point in bringing up something that was best forgotten,” her grandfather said.

There were so many assumptions in his speech, so many judgments. And all of them made on her behalf, with no consultation with her whatsoever.

Elizabeth’s hands curled into fists. “Is he alive? My real father?”

“I believe so, yes.”

She leaned forward. “Where does he live? What does he do? Is he in London? How can I contact him?”

“Elizabeth, I know this is a shock for you, but when you’ve had a chance to process I’m sure you’ll agree that it really doesn’t change your life in any substantial way,” Martin said.

Elizabeth focussed on Martin for the first time. “You knew.”

“Your grandfather told me after I proposed.”

“You’ve known for six months and you didn’t tell me?”

“Don’t be angry with Martin. I requested that he respect my confidence. I didn’t see the point in getting you upset over nothing,” her grandfather said.

Nothing? Nothing?

“I’m thirty years old. I don’t need to be protected. I deserve the truth. And my father being alive is not nothing. It is very decidedly something.”

Martin shifted uncomfortably. Her grandfather placed his hands flat on the leather blotter on his desk and eyed her steadily.

“We did what we thought was best for you.”

This was usually the point in any argument with her grandparents when she retreated. They’d taken her in when her parents died and bent over backward to ensure she had a happy childhood. They’d sent her to the best schools, attended every school play and recital and parent-teacher night, taken her on holidays to France and Italy—all despite her grandmother’s heart condition and frail health. Elizabeth had grown up with a strong sense of obligation toward them and a determination that she would never be more of a burden than she had to be.

She’d excelled at school, then at university. She’d never stayed out late or come home drunk. She’d never had a one-night stand. Even her husband-to-be had come with their seal of approval, since he worked at her grandfather’s law firm.

She owed them so much—everything, really. But she also owed herself. And what they’d done was wrong.

“This was my decision to make. You had no right to keep this from me.”

Because she didn’t trust herself to say more, because rage and a bunch of unwise, unruly words were pressing at the back of her throat, she stood and left the room. She’d barely made it halfway up the hall when she heard Martin coming after her.

“Elizabeth. Slow down.”

He caught her elbow. She spun on him, pulling her arm free.

“Don’t you dare tell me to calm down or that this doesn’t matter, Martin. Don’t you dare.”

Her chest was heaving with the intensity of her emotions and he took a step away, clearly taken aback by her ferocity.

“If I could have told you without breaking your grandfather’s confidence, I would have. Believe me.” He was deeply sincere, his eyes worried.

“You’re my fiancé, Martin. Don’t you think you owe your loyalty to me before my grandfather?”

He ran a hand through his hair. “Under ordinary circumstances, yes, but your grandfather and I have a professional relationship as well as a personal one.”

“I see.” And she did. Martin was hoping to be made partner at the firm this year. The last thing he wanted was to rock the boat.

He reached out and took her hand, his thumb brushing reassuringly across her knuckles. “Elizabeth, if we could go somewhere private and talk this through, I’m sure you’ll understand that everything was done with your best interests at heart.”

Her incredulous laughter sounded loud in the hall.

“My best interests? How on earth would you know what my best interests are, Martin? You’re so busy telling me what’s good for me, you have no idea who I am or what I really want. It’s like those bloody awful Waterford champagne flutes. No one cares what I think, and I’m such a pathetic coward I swallow it and swallow it and swallow it, even while I tell myself it’s because I want to do the right thing and not upset the applecart.”

Martin frowned. “Champagne flutes? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

She knew he didn’t, but it was all inextricably entwined in her head: her anger at her grandparents and Martin for this huge betrayal of her trust, her feelings of frustration and panic over the wedding, the suffocated feeling she got every time her grandparents made a decision for her or Martin spoke to her in that soothing tone and treated her as though she were made of fine porcelain.

“I can’t do this,” she said, more to herself than him. “This is a mistake.”

It was suddenly very clear to her.

Martin slid his arm around her shoulders, trying to draw her into a hug. “Elizabeth, you’re getting yourself upset.”

The feeling of his arms closing so carefully around her was the last straw. She braced her hands against his chest and pushed free from his embrace.

“I want to call off the wedding.”

Martin blinked, then reached for her again. “You don’t mean that. You’re upset.”

She held him off. “Violet has been saying for months that I should stop and think about what I’m doing, and she’s right. I don’t want this, Martin. I feel like I’m suffocating.”

“Violet. I might have known she’d have something to do with this. What rubbish has she been filling your head with now? The joys of being a free and easy slapper in West London? Or maybe how to get a head start on cirrhosis?”

He’d never liked Violet, which was only fair, since her best friend had taken a violent aversion to him from the moment they’d first met.

“No, actually. She pointed out that I was going to be thirty this year and that if I didn’t wake up and smell the coffee I’d be fifty and still living the life my grandparents chose for me.”

“What a load of rubbish.”

She looked at him, standing there in his Savile Row suit, his bespoke shirt pristine-white. He didn’t understand. Maybe he couldn’t.

She knew about his childhood, about the poverty and the sacrifices his working-class single mom had made to send him to university. Elizabeth’s life—the life they were supposed to have together once they were married—was the fulfillment of all his aspirations. The high-paying partnership with the long-established law firm, the well-bred wife to come home to, the holidays on the French or Italian Riviera, membership at all the right men’s clubs.

“We can’t get married, Martin. You don’t know who I am,” she said quietly. “How could you? I don’t even know who I am.”

She turned and walked up the hallway.

“Elizabeth. Can we at least talk about this?”

She kept walking. Her grandparents were going to be upset when they heard she’d called off the wedding. It wouldn’t simply be a case of her grandmother having a headache—this would instigate full-scale damage control. They’d use every trick in the book to try to make her see sense. They’d make her feel guilty and stupid and wrong without actually accusing her of being any of those things. And she was so used to not rocking the boat, to toeing the line and doing the right thing that she was terribly afraid that she might listen to them and wind up married to Martin and unpacking all those expensive Harrods housewares in her marital home.

She needed some time to herself. To think. To work things out. Somewhere private and quiet. She thought of Violet’s apartment above her shop and quickly discarded it. Even if it wasn’t only a one bedroom, she wouldn’t find much peace and quiet in Violet’s hectic world. Plus it would be the first place her grandparents would look for her. Then she remembered what she’d said to Martin— I don’t even know who I am —and the answer came to her.

She would go to her father. Wherever he might be. She would find him, and she would go to him, and she would start working out who Elizabeth Jane Mason really was, and what she really wanted.

FOUR DAYS LATER, ELIZABETH OPENED her rental car window and sucked in big lungfuls of fresh air. Her eyes were gritty with fatigue and she opened them wide, willing herself to wakefulness. She’d been traveling for nearly thirty hours to reach the other side of the world and now the foreign, somberhued scrub of rural Australia was rushing past as she drove southwest from Melbourne toward Phillip Island, a small dot on the map nestled in the mouth of Westernport Bay.

She’d spent the past few days holed up in a hotel room in Soho while Violet leaned on her police-officer cousin to use his contacts to locate Elizabeth’s father. The moment she’d learned that Sam Blackwell’s last known place of residence was Phillip Island in Victoria, Australia, Elizabeth had booked a room at a local hotel and jumped on a plane.

She hadn’t spoken to her grandparents beyond assuring them she was fine and perfectly sane and determined to stand by her decision to cancel the wedding. Her grandfather had tried to talk her out of it over the phone, of course, but she’d cut the conversation short.