I relay this, and Charlie deflates further.
‘Nothing? You can’t think of anywhere?’
‘I’m sorry,’ I tell him. ‘I can’t.’
‘Please,’ he says. ‘Please think. Is there really nowhere else?’
‘I am. I’m thinking. I . . . No. Apart from a walk on Alnmouth beach we only went for lunch in Edinburgh. And of course she visited me a few times in the mother and baby unit, but she won’t be referring to that. I’m sorry.’
Charlie looks desperate.
‘OK,’ Jeremy says, standing up. ‘We should get going. Please ring us, any time of day, if you remember anything that might make sense.’
They make to leave.
I could have been your mother, I want to cry, as Charlie heads out of our sitting room. You could have grown up right here in this house. You could have been my baby.
But he’s already in the hallway, this full-grown man, then out of the front door. He starts walking down our path, ducking to avoid the tangled foliage, saying thanks and goodbye over his shoulder because he doesn’t want me to see how upset he is. I don’t know when, or even if, I will see him again.
Jeremy stops on the doorstep, and turns to me. ‘I will never be able to express how sorry I am,’ he says. ‘Never, Emma. I hope you believe me when I tell you I had no idea.’
I don’t say anything. Right now I don’t want to believe anything anyone tells me, ever again.
‘It does make so much more sense, now,’ he goes on. ‘Her paranoia, the obsession with you wanting Charlie back. She must have been terrified you’d remember what really happened.’
But of course I hadn’t remembered. I couldn’t remember. You could have told me I’d robbed a bank and murdered all the cashiers, and I’d have believed you. I’d have created that memory, just like I created the memory of a smothering, because when you’re that lost, your only anchors are the things people tell you.
After Charlie and Jeremy are gone, we sit in silence.
Yet again the world has shifted. My entire adult life has been nothing more than a story – and not even mine.
The story of a woman called Janice. A woman who allowed me to believe I had tried to smother my baby, because she wanted him for herself. A woman who took a restraining order out against me when I started following him.
She’d have had me sent to prison if she could. She had me sacked from my presenting job, knowing the humiliation it would bring; the financial loss. But worse than anything else, far worse, she stole my baby.
Leo shifts over, silently, to hold my hand, as I cry for all that could have been. For my baby Charlie, that smiling infant with his soft blonde hair, his simple, boundless trust in me. For his whole life, spent with someone else.
John falls asleep in his bed; Leo turns out the lights and sits with me in darkness, as the rain pelts our tiny old house.
I gave up my baby for a lie.
Chapter Sixty
LEO
Minutes – or maybe hours – after I fall asleep in the shed, Emma comes in and stands next to the sofa. ‘Leo,’ she whispers.
Silently, I shuffle up to make space. John Keats, who was excited about a night in the shed, is asleep under the duvet. God knows how he’s breathing. I poke him with a foot and he moves around a bit, grumbling, but refuses to budge. Emma has to perch on the edge of the sofa.
‘Leo . . .’ she whispers again, and in that moment I just want to whisper, ‘Hi!’ and kiss her. I want us to laugh about our last meeting in here, when all we had to worry about was whether or not her chemo had worked and how awful my dairy-free chocolate was. I want to take our clothes off, not for sex, but for the pleasure of her night-warm skin on mine.