Page 82 of The Bookshop By the Loch

Her voice cracked and a sob caught in her throat. His mother lifted her face up to the bookshop ceiling for a few moments.

“Mrs Black. Are you alright?” I knew it was a bloody stupid question under the circumstances.

She gave me a brief smile through the threatening tears. “No, I’m not but I have to do this. There’s been enough secrecy over the years and it has to stop.”

Trevor, standing beside her, snatched up her hand and gave it a supportive squeeze.

Tobias watched them linking hands. His eyes flashed. “I said, help with what?”

Mrs Black looked stricken. “Your dad and I were desperate to start a family. We thought it was just going to take a bit of time, but we’d been married for three years and I wasn’t falling pregnant.” Her face pleaded with her son for understanding. “I wanted to protect you,” she managed. “Naomi did what she did with the best of intentions. I also wanted to protect my late sister’s memory.”

“What has Aunt Naomi got to do with any of this?” asked Tobias. He turned to me and then back to his mum. “What are you talking about?”

Mrs Black clamped her eyes shut, as though willing the whole sorry situation to vanish in a puff of smoke. She forced them open again. “Naomi wasn’t your aunt, Tobias.”

Trevor nodded. “That’s right.” Now it was his turn to shuffle on the spot, looking like he wished he were anywhere else but here.

Tobias looked aghast. His mouth sprang open and shut. “What?”

Trevor looked pained. He ground his jaw. There was a crackling, electrified silence. “Caroline isn’t your biological mum.”

“Your aunt Naomi was your real mother. Not me.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

Tobias let out a long, low breath. “Jesus.” He stared, horrified. “Are you serious, Mum?”

Caroline could only manage a brief nod through her tears.

“Perhaps we should sit down,” I suggested, reaching out to squeeze Tobias’s arm. Concern for him ripped through me.

Tobias remained standing on the spot, shellshocked, as Trevor, Caroline and I swapped stricken looks.

“Tobias?” croaked Caroline.

He was fighting to straighten his broad shoulders. He moved stiffly towards the office and sank down in one of the chairs next to me, as if in slow motion. He was struggling to make eye contact with either Trevor or Caroline. “So?” he demanded. “Can someone tell me why my life has suddenly become like an episode of some daytime soap opera?”

Trevor’s dark gaze was troubled. He shifted on the chair beside Caroline, before raising one finger and pushing at his round spectacles again.

Caroline dabbed her wet eyes with a hankie. “When Naomi was seventeen, she met and fell in love with a local car mechanic, Cormac Munro.”

Tobias’s mouth hardened.

“They were besotted with one another and when she was eighteen, they got engaged, but at Christmas that same year, Cormac was killed on his motorbike. The weather had been atrocious and he hit a patch of ice on one of the country lanes.” Caroline hesitated, gathered herself and then continued. “Naomi was distraught. She was in a state of shock, as you might imagine. Then, a few weeks after Cormac’s death, she told me her period was late.”

Caroline went on to explain that at first, Naomi was convinced that it was just the stress of losing Cormac. “But it turned out it wasn’t. She was pregnant.”

I shot a concerned look at Tobias seated beside me. His stubbled face was ashen.

Her hands tumbled over each other in her lap. “Naomi was adamant she wasn’t going to have a termination, but in those days, single mothers… well… I don’t have to tell you, I’m sure.”

Caroline raised her damp face to the office ceiling and turned back to stare across at Tobias. “That was when Naomi suggested your father and I adopt you. We couldn’t start our own family and we knew we could give you the life you deserved.”

Tobias’s jaw clenched.

Trevor flashed a cautious look at his sister-in-law beside him.

Caroline shuffled on her chair and dabbed at her face with a floral stitched hankie she plucked from her bag. Her sky-blue eyes shone with tears.