‘Yay!’ Alfie was now jumping for joy as Jamie, Ella and my children circled around the pool.
Ella took Alfie’s hand in her free one, and they all walked past me, waving. I didn’t move, just watched them like a family going off for ice cream on holiday.
With the kids gone, it was so quiet. The pool was still, not a ripple. Even the birds had stopped singing; it felt almost eerie. All I could hear in the silence was the imaginary voice of the woman selling drinks on the side of the road, and her warning, ‘pericolo’ and ‘morte’。
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I spent the next hour on my sunlounger, but couldn’t settle. Where were they? How long would they be? Were they okay? I worried because Alfie wasn’t good with roads, and despite lots of ‘training’ from me was easily distracted. Violet would be too busy trying to be like Ella, copying the ice cream she chose, the way she ate it, the things she said. And then there was Freddie…
I couldn’t concentrate, and after about half an hour of attempting to read on my Kindle, I had to turn it off. I looked over at Dan, who was absorbed in his book, so I opened Instagram and found Ella’s account.
Opening up her page, I was greeted by the usual bikini-baring selfies, and I scrolled through – a photo of Dan, Jamie, tellingly none of me. I looked at her friends, some she’d tagged, and one name led to another, and I looked at the different pages of all the Ella lookalikes and then I spotted @EllaFamily1. It was different from her other friends’ accounts, lots of moody black and white shots, and I had to put my reading glasses on to make them out. The photographs had been over exposed and most weren’t full face. They were gorgeous photos of a beautiful family – in a restaurant eating pasta, around a swimming pool, a little boy walking through a garden, the sun on his bright blond hair, children laughing with Mum and Dad. Except I realised this wasn’t a mum and dad and kids – it was Jamie and Ella, with my kids. #Family #Holiday #children
I became more alarmed as I continued to look through swathes of photos of my kids. To anyone who didn’t know, this was a family account, and it seemed like the kids belonged to Ella and Jamie. And all the photos gave the same impression – Ella with my children. #FamilyTime. Ella and Violet putting on make-up together at her bedroom mirror. #GrownupGirl. There was even one of them all asleep in bed. #NightNight – she must have sneaked into their room to take that one!
‘Have you bloody seen this?’ I sat up so quickly, I almost fell off the sunlounger.
Dan looked up. ‘What now?’
‘Don’t say “what now?” like that. This is outrageous.’
I was waving my phone screen in his face and he was trying to sit up. ‘Clare, calm down, just a minute.’
He peered in reluctantly. ‘They’re nice photos, I don’t see your problem,’ he said, like this had nothing to do with him, like it wasn’t his family Ella was exploiting.
‘My problem is that she’s implying that the kids are hers… and …’ I could barely get the words out. ‘She took these photos when we weren’t around, without our permission, Dan. You can’t just photograph other people’s kids and put them on the Internet.’ He shrugged, and I stopped dead in my tracks. ‘Oh. You gave her permission, didn’t you?’ I said.
He looked very uncomfortable. ‘No – not exactly, but thinking about it, she was saying something the other day – about becoming a mummy blogger.’
I was furious. ‘This gets worse, so she’s also exploiting them – getting money and free shit off the back of our kids.’
‘She wouldn’t do that.’
‘She has,’ I said, prodding my finger on the screen; why couldn’t he see what was in front of him? ‘I wonder if that’s why she was so keen to take them for ice cream…？’ I said, refreshing the page. ‘Whoa, look at this!’ Right on cue up popped posed pictures of our children eating ice cream. #FamilyTime #FamilyHoliday. And the most recent was a photo of Jamie with Freddie on his knee, holding a spoon of ice cream to his mouth. #Gelato #Theylookjustthesame. In an instant my mouth went so dry I couldn’t swallow. Was she taunting me? What if she’d worked out that through her account, I’d find these snaps and she knew there was nothing I could do about it? This was a warning, Freddie and Jamie together on this account; the hashtags would spill our secret, she wouldn’t need to. I couldn’t let Dan see it.
Fortunately, he lay back down with his book. ‘I don’t know what your problem is, they’re cute photos of the kids and, okay, I’m sorry. It’s my fault, I led her to believe I’d given her permission from both of us. It’s not hurting anyone, but if it upsets you, we can ask her to take them down.’