And often she thought about him, the baby, and the decision she’d made for both of them. And she wondered, with a pang, where he was and what he was doing, and she reminded herself of all those happy families, all those smiling children in the brochures. And sometimes she was absolutely convinced she had made the right decision for everyone, and other times she questioned whether she had just made the right decision for herself. But one thing she had grown increasingly sure of as time passed was that wherever he was, her son, whoever he was growing up to be, was better off not knowing his father, never learning the kind of person his father was.
Then she looked up and saw him.
Her son.
A lone figure, dressed for a run, headphones around his neck, throwing stones angrily at the water, as hard and as far as he could into the waves.
It was as he stooped to pick up another handful of them that he realized she was there.
‘Hi Kurt,’ she said.
He let fly another stone, rubbed at his nose with the back of his sleeve. For a moment she thought he was going to ignore her.
Then he glanced up. Then he spoke.
‘You didn’t know, did you? About the filming?’
Nikki tried to keep her face from crumpling. Shook her head.
‘I never suspected,’ she said. ‘Not until this weekend. Not until you asked me about the package, told me what had happened yesterday. I had no idea. I honestly had no idea. I thought I knew Ned inside out because I had to, for years, for work, for my job. He was someone I respected, someone I trusted. And then you find out—’
She broke off.
Kurt looked across at her. ‘I know exactly how that feels.’
‘You’ve . . . watched it then?’ she asked.
‘Not all of it. But I’ve seen enough, to get the picture. Heard enough. The same lines, the same patter, the same jokes. Dad pouring himself a drink, pouring them a drink, sitting on the bed next to them. And then a jump cut to the next girl, the next Home room . . .’ Kurt took a deep breath, shook his head. She searched Kurt’s eyes, trying to gauge if her own fifteen-year-old face had featured on the film, if he had recognized her.
‘And I guess Ned probably thinks he’s done me a favour with that. Spared me from actually having to watch what happened next.’ Kurt rubbed with two fingers at a point between his eyebrows. ‘But now I’m left imagining it . . .’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Nikki said.
‘You know, it’s funny, growing up in the family I did, being raised the way my parents raised all of us. We were all supposed to be equal, and no one ever talked about which of us were their biological children, which of us were adopted. We were told our whole lives never even to think about it, that it didn’t matter. We were part of the tribe, Ron was Daddy, Marianne was Mommy, that was that. And our birth certificates have their names on them – we couldn’t find out even if we wanted to, without a DNA test, and I doubt my father would even be able to tell us now. I didn’t care but I think there was always a part of me that hoped they were my biological parents, that he was my father. Not because I thought it would make me better than any of the others, not because I thought he would love me any more. Just because I admired the man so much, you know? Just because part of me believed if I was related to him in that way I had more of a chance of inheriting his magic. Now I hope to God I don’t have a drop of his blood in me.’
Nikki swallowed the words that were bubbling up in her throat. ‘Who you are has got nothing to do with who your father was, or what happened in those Home suites.’
Kurt looked down at his palm to select a stone to throw, then seemed to think better of it.
‘I’ve spent my whole life trying to be like that man. Idolizing him. But I should have known – I should have seen it,’ he said. ‘It was just one of those things you take for granted, stuff that Dad and his friends used to say, that Mom would roll her eyes at. That if you were a successful man there would always be these women, this particular kind of woman, that would throw herself at you. That it was one of the embarrassments of success, one of the downsides. I guess I just believed them.’