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It took a moment for Anouk to realise that she was still standing with her arm raised. She lowered it—it felt like in slow motion—but still couldn’t work her mouth enough to answer.
‘You’ve been standing there for the better part of ten minutes. Would you like to come in?’
Would she? Her mind felt split in two.
Stiffly, she bobbed her head, trying not to allow the older woman’s soft smile to work its way inside her, and let herself be ushered carefully into the house.
A string of Christmas cards adorned the hallway, testament to how popular this new grandmother of hers appeared to be, and a decent, prettily decorated tree stood proudly in one corner of the living room.
‘Your father decorated it every year. For me,’ she was told by this older woman whom Anouk supposed was her grandmother. ‘I don’t think he ever had one at his own home. He always said Christmas was for the children, and he’d enjoy it when he had you to share it with.’
Anouk didn’t know how to respond.
A couple of minutes later they were sitting in silence at a small, glossy, yew dining table with quaint coasters in front of them and a teapot, cups and saucers, and a quintessential plate of biscuits. It was so utterly English that Anouk had to swallow a faintly hysterical gurgle.
‘I got the bag,’ she managed awkwardly after what felt like an age. Maybe two.
Someone—presumably Sol—had left it in Resus for her the next day. But he hadn’t been to see her.
She told herself it was for the best.
Her companion nodded and offered an encouraging smile. It occurred to Anouk that the older woman—it was hard to think of her as her paternal grandmother—was as nervous as she was, if not more so.
Somehow, the knowledge bolstered her.
‘It meant a lot. I never...knew...’
‘There are more bags like that,’ her grandmother said sadly. ‘Full up. Every Christmas, every birthday, without fail. We gave up sending them to you—they always got returned. But we never gave up on you.’
‘I didn’t even know you wrote to me,’ she managed, her voice thick. ‘I only knew about one letter, but I didn’t know what it said, or when it had been sent.’
‘We wrote to you all the time. Letters at first, as you saw in that bag. But diaries after a while.’
‘Oh.’ Anouk took a sip of tea by way of distracting herself, but suddenly it was impossible to swallow.
‘Do you want to see them?’
Her grandmother pushed her chair back and Anouk almost fell over herself to stop her.
‘No.’ She hadn’t meant to make the older woman jump. ‘No. Sorry. It’s just...’
‘Too much to take at once,’ her grandmother guessed. ‘Another time, perhaps.’
‘Another time,’ Anouk agreed, surprised
to realise that she really meant it.
She still hadn’t processed the emotions that had crashed over her, threatening to overwhelm her, when she’d looked into that bag and found a selection of gifts from when she was a baby, to this very year.
The letters that had accompanied them—the first few marked Return to Sender in her mother’s unmistakeable loopy handwriting—had been like a sledgehammer to her heart. Every word thumping painfully into her. Words she’d longed to hear as a kid but which her self-obsessed mother had never once uttered to her.
Her father and her grandmother had each penned letters that had been so heartfelt, so pained, that Anouk couldn’t have denied their veracity even if she’d wanted to. Which she didn’t.
They spoke about how much they loved her, how the dimples on her baby cheeks, or the gurgle of her laugh, had filled them with such pride, such joy, and such a feeling of completeness. And the only thing that had undercut it all had been the fact that the two of them had been compelled to snatch every snippet they could from the magazine articles, or the news items, or the TV interviews, in which her mother had trotted her out with the sole reason of making herself look like a good and doting mother.
It had taken Anouk almost two days to track down a VHS player so that she could see the recordings her father had made on the two occasions he’d travelled to the States to try to speak to Annalise Hartwood, only for her security team to practically manhandle him away.
So much for her mother’s claims that her father had wanted nothing to do with them.
