So now, she had nothing to go on, no way of verifying what she thought Daniel was trying to say. She tried to picture his face, to see if she had ever felt that there was anything familiar about it, but nothing came to mind. He was just Daniel, Hope’s chef boyfriend, nice enough on the surface but with nothing to suggest that they shared DNA.
But he had known Mum. That she did believe. Her mum had told the tree stories over and over because Romany loved to hear them. She could accept that her mum and Daniel had been there in the tree-top camp together. She was even prepared to believe that they had gone out together back in the day. But this? It was too much to take in.
From upstairs she could hear Tiger calling down to her. ‘Is that you, Romey? Have you had a good time?’
And then, when she didn’t appear within the time he would have expected, his head appeared at the top of the stairs and he peered down at her.
‘What are you doing down there?’ he said, laughing at her. And then, ‘Hey. What’s up?’
Romany didn’t speak because she didn’t know how to start. She stayed where she was against the door with her eyes tightly shut like she’d done as a child when she wanted something to go away. She could hear Tiger making his way down the stairs towards her, but she was frozen to the spot.
‘Come on, Romes,’ he said as he got closer. ‘What’s this all about? Did something happen with Hope? Has she upset you?’
There wasn’t much room in the porch area; Tiger stayed where he was on the second step, so that when Romany opened her eyes she had to look up at him. The space felt enclosed and intimate.
‘Did you know my dad?’ she whispered.
There was a pause, a heartbeat before Tiger replied.
‘Ah,’ he said.
What was that supposed to mean? She hadn’t talked to the guardians about her dad for the same reasons that she’d refused to talk about him to her mum. But maybe they all knew, and it was just she who didn’t. In fact, that would make sense. They’d all been friends since they were teenagers. They were bound to know.
Apart from Hope, of course. How Hope fitted in had always been unclear to Romany and, she suspected, to them all. But was this it? Maybe it wasn’t Hope that her mum had wanted to be part of Romany’s life, but Hope’s boyfriend?
‘What do you mean, “Ah”？’ she asked. Her voice sounded harsh and she realised that she was building up to being angry.
‘I met your dad once,’ said Tiger. ‘Before you were born.’
‘And . . .’
Tiger made a face that said, what else do you want me to say? ‘He seemed all right. A nice enough bloke. I mean, I literally met him once.’
‘Is Daniel . . . Hope’s Daniel,’ she clarified, ‘is he my dad?’
Tiger paused, ran his tongue over his teeth whilst he decided what to say.
‘Yes. I think so.’
‘You think so?!’ said Romany, her voice suddenly louder and bordering on a shout.
Tiger ran a hand over his chin, apparently considering his next answer, and Romany felt a hot ball of fury building in her chest as she watched him decide what to tell her.
‘Yes, then,’ he said. ‘He is. I thought I recognised him in the restaurant on Christmas Day, but I couldn’t place him. He didn’t seem to know me, and obviously he didn’t say anything so . . . But I’ve thought about it since then and, yeah, I think he is.’
‘And you were going to tell me when, exactly?’
He let out a sigh and looked at her forlornly. ‘Oh come on, Romey. Don’t shoot the messenger, mate? What was I supposed to do? I thought it was him, but I didn’t know for sure. And you never seemed to want to know anything about him, so I just kept schtum.’
‘And what about Maggie and Leon? Do they know too?’ asked Romany accusingly.
Tiger shrugged. ‘I mentioned it to Mags, yes. But she never met your dad. I only did by accident. So, we decided to wait and see how things played out. I mean, what with your exams and everything, it seemed like the right thing to do. Sorry if we screwed up.’
He looked genuinely upset and Romany felt her anger lift a little.
‘What’s happened, anyway?’ he continued. ‘Has Hope said something?’
‘Not Hope,’ Romany replied, her voice breaking as she tried to hold back her sobs. ‘Daniel. He gave me a lift back and we got chatting and he said that he’d known Mum when they were young and then he said that he’d moved to York to be near her and me. And I just kind of put two and two together, and then I ran away.’ Her words all ran into one another in her rush to tell the tale, and then emotion got the better of her and she began to cry.