Page 49 of A Secret Scottish Escape

Everything was as it should be and yet my mother had just made everything I thought was true implode.

No. She’s a liar. A compulsive, spiteful liar.

I whirled round to face Dad.

He looked confused. I shuffled back up the path and into his arms, and he held me close. I never wanted to let go.

“I don’t believe her,” I rattled. “Not a word.”

I waited for Dad to tell me he agreed with me, but he didn’t. He hugged me tighter.

I jerked backwards, freeing myself from his arms. “You think she’s telling the truth, don’t you?”

He filled the open doorway and dragged a hand through his hair. “No.” It was as if Mum had planted this seed inside my dad’s mind and he was battling to uproot it.

I felt as though I’d been punched in the chest. “Oh shit. You do. You suspect she might be telling the truth.”

Clarity forced itself to the forefront of my mind. I remembered Dad’s reaction when I suggested his band re-form and appear at my club. My stomach fell. “Is that why you didn’t want to reunite with Battalion?” I began to move the pieces of the puzzle around. “What aren’t you telling me?” Another thought struck. I was desperate for the truth. It seemed to be sadly lacking in my life recently. “Dad?”

After an icy pause, I listened to my father admit that he had always harboured suspicions about Mum and Ed, one of the other members of Battalion.

“So, are you trying to tell me Mum and Ed had an affair?”

Dad blinked several times. He didn’t want to revisit those memories. “Yes.” Frustration shone out of him.

All the doubts and the questions and the assumptions felt as if they were eating me from the inside out.

I choked back fury as the dappled sun cascaded across the planes of his face. I thought I knew the answer to my next question, but I had the burning compunction to ask it anyway.

“Was it Ed she hinted could be my biological father?”

Dad’s agony was evident. “Layla…”

I shook my head. Why couldn’t the people I loved be straight with me? Mac, my mother, and now my own father.

“Yes,” he replied after an agonising pause. “She hinted it could also be him.”

My jaw grew slack at the thought of Ed Stockton, the band’s surly bass player.

I blinked, struggling to take in the scents and sounds of the Scottish countryside playing out around me in Dad’s garden. “And you believe her?”

Dad chewed the inside of his mouth as he considered my question. “This fling they had happened not long after your mother and I got married. I suspected there might have been something between her and Ed at the time, but I didn’t want to accept it.”

“Why did you never tackle Mum and Ed about it?”

He gave a resigned shrug. “What can I say? I didn’t want to face up to the possibility it was true. I loved her.”

He reached out his big, capable hands and beckoned me to him before he began to explain that that was why he was reluctant to see Battalion get back together. “I don’t have to tell you what band line-ups can be like. Talk about revolving doors.”

I nodded my head.

“Me and the boys have had our fallings-out over the years, like most groups, but when Ed threw a real paddy over his song lyrics being called below par and left the band all those years ago, I was relieved.”

Dad gave a sad smile that tore at my insides. It seemed so incongruous, standing out here, with the birds lazily flapping through the tree tops. “I thought – I hoped – I had seen the back of him, especially when we recruited a new bass player.”

My fuddled brain came up with an image of Ed’s replacement. “Gary?”

“That’s right,” said Dad. “Gary McDermott. He was a lovely guy and much more accommodating than Ed. Unfortunately, he just wasn’t in the same league on the bass guitar as Ed.”