“Goodness, how romantic,” Ronnie said. “It’s like a novel.”
“Yes.” Lila smiled grimly. “Exactly like one, it turned out. Pure fiction. His mother was a supermarket cashier from Barnet. A single mum—she’d had a fling with a GI toward the end of the war, apparently—and put him in a children’s home when he was three and she couldn’t cope on her own. But she’d come looking for him after all those years.”
“Wow, what did he say?” Elise tried to picture the hideous reunion.
“Oh, he claimed she was some sort of fantasist and sent her on her way. But Maureen came back when he was at work and showed me his birth certificate and photos from his early years. And letters he’d written as a child pleading with her to come and get him. It was him. She was after money, of course.”
“So did he admit it?”
“No, he carried on dismissing it as elaborate lies.” Lila put her cup down. “The tragedy is that I would have understood if he’d told me the truth then—that he’d been ashamed of his start in life. That he’d been afraid people would look down on him because of his background, so he’d created this new persona. I mean, my family wasn’t anything special—I wouldn’t have judged him. But Charles had a lot to lose, I suppose. He was a success—buying and selling property and making lots of money. He wasn’t going to risk losing all that. So he carried on pretending. He must have felt the lies he’d told were too big to be unpicked. The humiliation was too awful to contemplate.”
“But what did you do?” Ronnie said.
“I stayed for a while. We had a child. She wasn’t a lie. And he adored her. But in the end, I couldn’t be part of it anymore. Going to those dinners and parties and hearing him winding people into his fantasy was like standing on the edge of a cliff, just waiting for him to fall. And of course he knew that I knew he was a fake. He grew to hate me for it.”
“What did you tell Birdie?” Elise said.
“As little as possible. When I left him, she was very young. I told Charles I wouldn’t lie to our daughter if she asked questions but I didn’t volunteer anything. She was a smart girl, though, and she eventually worked it out for herself when she was thirteen. She stopped seeing him and took my name, Nightingale. He blamed me—of course he did—but it was his deceit that poisoned their relationship. We were getting on with our lives without him when it happened. And Birdie had such a wonderful future ahead of her.”
Lila suddenly stood and hurried into the house. She reappeared clutching a picture of their daughter. The before photo, Elise realized. The same one Charlie kept in his wallet.
“She was so beautiful. And she had a place at Oxford when that monster attacked her. This was taken two weeks before.”
It was a studio photo of Birdie: dark, shiny hair curling over bare shoulders and a Hollywood smile lighting up her face. So much happiness and excitement captured in that moment. And snuffed out within days.
“Carpe diem,” Elise’s mum used to mutter when she read stories like that in the newspaper. “Seize the day, Elise. You never know what’s round the corner.”
Elise put that thought away—what had been round the corner had come barreling into her already. She used to think she could smell bad news coming. But she’d missed the big ones. Hugh and breast cancer.
“You don’t know what it was like . . .” Lila said quietly, shrinking down in her chair. “I was lost to antidepressants for months.”
“It must have been a terrible time,” Ronnie said. “How did you cope?”
“How did Charlie cope?” Elise added.
“Badly. We both struggled.” Lila started to weep again. “And Adam’s family, of course.”
Elise zoned out as Ronnie worked her magic and tried to untangle the threads of the story.
“Had they known each other long?” Ronnie said.
“No, just a few weeks,” Lila said. “I hadn’t even met Adam. The poor boy was beaten with a poker and died from his injuries. The police said he and Birdie were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“What do you mean? The wrong place? Where were they?”
“At Charles’s house.”
Elise felt the hairs stand up on her arms. She cleared her throat.
“Charlie’s? Why? I thought Birdie and her dad were estranged.”
“So did I.”
“So was he attacked too?”