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You are in my heart for as long as the world turns. Before you, my life was empty and cold, and your love has brought me more happiness than I deserve. The thought of our wedding day, and spending the rest of my life with you, fills me with joy.
Rosie stopped reading. She’d been so keen to discover what lay inside the box, but reading such an intimate letter felt wrong – especially as the handwriting was different from the scrawled messages inside the Christmas and birthday cards she’d received from her father. This was a love letter to her mother from another man; a man whom Rosie knew nothing about.
She sat quietly for a while, with the letter in her lap, wondering what to do next. Her mother had hidden it away for a reason, but how could this secret hurt Sofia now she was gone? And Rosie had to know… Taking a deep breath, she scanned through the letter again and her eyes strayed to the final two lines:
Know that you are always loved.
J
Rosie’s hands shook as she smoothed out the letter and grabbed her phone. She flicked through her photos to the card that was tied to the lilies on her mother’s grave. The writing was the same: the ‘a’ not closed, as though written in haste, and the loop-less lower stroke of the ‘g’. The mysterious J from the card was her mother’s secret suitor, declaring his undying love in this letter, and a part of Sofia’s life to the very end. How could Rosie not know who he was?
Tipping out the remaining contents of the box, she found a yellowing copy of the house lease that had come as such a bombshell, her birth certificate, and a pair of white knitted bootees with pink edges. There was also a faded photo of her as a tiny baby, being held in bed by her mother with another older woman standing next to them.
On the back of the photo, carefully printed in her mother’s handwriting, were the words:Me withRose Emily (born 4.10 am, 8 June 1989) and Morag MacIntyre.
Driftwood House creaked and groaned while Rosie turned the photo over and over in her hands. She’d never seen it before, but very few old photos were on display in the house. Her mother had always been one for looking ahead and keeping the past in the past.
Overwhelmed by a feeling of nostalgia, for precious things lost, Rosie went to the large oak cupboard in the hall, got on her knees and started rooting through it. At the back, her fingers closed around her mum and dad’s wedding album. She hadn’t looked at it in years.
She opened it and flicked through the small number of photos. Her mum said she and Dad hadn’t bothered with a proper photographer because they’d decided suddenly to get married. So the only photos were snaps taken by the strangers they’d pulled in off the street to witness the ceremony.
Rosie had thought it wonderfully romantic when she was growing up – her parents loved each other so much, they couldn’t wait to be wed, so took themselves off to the register office in Exeter on a whim.
She looked at the first photo of her parents standing hand in hand on the steps of the office. Her mum with long fair hair, staring at the camera, and Dad next to her. They were both smiling but looked uncomfortable, as though they were nervous. Her father was in smart trousers, an open-neck shirt and dark jacket, and her mother was wearing a flowing green maxi-dress that matched her eyes. Rosie was pretty sure that dress was still in the back of her mum’s wardrobe.
She studied the picture more closely. The letter from J must have been sent to Cove Cottage not that long before this wedding photo was taken. But no one in the village had ever mentioned Sofia having a fiancé before Rosie’s dad, and Belinda would be all over any hint of long-lost romance like a rash. It would be gossip gold in Heaven’s Cove, even after all these years.
Rosie sat back on her heels, feeling confused. Rather than uncovering her mother’s secrets at Driftwood House, she was only adding to them day by day.
She ran her fingers across the faces of her parents in their wedding clothes. Did her dad know about J when he stood in the register office and said ‘I do’? Did he know that Sofia had presumably loved another man enough to promise to marry him?
‘I hope not,’ she said into the empty hallway, feeling close to tears. Though maybe her dad had been well aware of J and had stolen Sofia away from him. Rosie sighed. Dealing with bereavement was hard enough without the secrets her mother had left behind, like landmines littering her way forward. Secrets that were making her doubt the close relationship she’d thought she had with her mum.
‘What the…?’
Someone was hammering on the front door, the noise echoing through the empty house. Rosie jumped up and her parents’ photo album slid facedown onto the tiles.
