“I don’t know what you mean,” Hal said, but she felt a tide of blood beginning to climb from her breast up her throat to her cheeks, a great flush of guilt, like a tidal wave of shame.
“That’s okay, then,” Ezra said. He looked out of the window at the falling snow, deliberately not meeting her eyes, giving her time to compose herself.
“So . . .” he said after a minute or two, speaking still as if to the night sky outside. “You’re Maggie’s child. I’m still getting used to that fact. Did you . . . did you know . . . that she lived here for a while? With us, I mean.”
Hal felt her breath catch.
“Before I came here, I didn’t know that, no. But Abel told me about a cousin Maggie. That’s what made me add two and two together afterwards. I—I wish she’d told me about Trepassen.”
He looked back at her, meeting her eyes. His were dark and full of understanding.
“It wasn’t a very happy time for any of us. I can understand why she would want to forget about it.”
“Ezra.” Hal felt a lump in her throat, and she took a deep breath. “Ezra, can I show you something?”
He nodded, puzzled, and Hal dug in her pocket and pulled out her tarot tin. Inside was the photograph Abel had given her, folded in half. She unfolded it carefully, and watched as Ezra’s face split in a smile of recognition, though there was something sad in his eyes too. He reached out, and touched the cheek of his twin, very gently, as if she could feel it through the paper.
“Ezra, did you—do you know . . . who took this photo?”
He looked up at her, frowning slightly, as though he had been somewhere very far away, and the effort was in dragging his thoughts back to the present day.
“Sorry, what did you say?”
“Who took this photo?”
“I’m not sure if I remember,” he said slowly. “Why do you ask?”
“Because—” Hal took a deep breath. “Because I think—I think he might be my father.” The words felt like a confession, and she felt a great release of some kind of tension she had been hardly aware of holding back, but they provoked no reaction in Ezra; he just continued to look at her, puzzled.
“Why do you say that?”
“I found my mother’s diary,” Hal said. “She talks about this day—about the person taking the photograph. That’s all I know about him—that and the fact that he had blue eyes.”
“Blue eyes?” Ezra said. He frowned again, not following her logic. “But yours are dark. How did you work that out?”
“It’s in the diary too,” Hal said. It was such a relief to talk it over with someone that she felt the words tumbling out in her eagerness to explain. “There’s this line she writes, his blue eyes meeting her dark ones. And she mentions someone called Ed, says that he was there the day the photograph was taken. I asked Abel, but he said there was no one else there apart from the four of you—but—”
She broke off. Ezra’s face had changed. He looked fully in the here and now, and there was a touch of something Hal could not place in his expression. She thought it might be a kind of dread.
“But that’s not true,” he said, very slowly. Hal nodded. She felt something inside her grow quite still, waiting.
“Oh God,” Ezra said. He put his face in his hands. “Abel. What have you done?”
“So . . . he was lying?”
“Yes. But I don’t know why he would protect him.”
“Protect who?” Hal asked. She was almost certain she already knew, but she needed to hear the name—hear it from the lips of someone who had been there, someone who could tell her for sure.
“Edward.”
Hal felt her stomach turn inside her, as if she were on the Twister at the foot of the pier and it had flipped her in a great arc above the sea, one of those sickening twists that left you gasping.
So it was true.
She swallowed. It was so strange. All the pieces had pointed to him—the name in the diary, the blue eyes . . . and yet . . . and yet she felt no connection to him, and now that Ezra had confirmed her suspicions she felt nothing except a kind of sickness.
He is my father, she thought, trying to make it real. Edward is my father—why would my mother lie about it all these years?
Why had he said nothing? Abel must know the truth after all—or suspect it, at least—or else why would he have lied to protect his lover from Hal’s inquiries?
But why lie? Why should Edward hide his identity from his own daughter?
Unless . . . unless there was something else he was hiding. . . .
“Edward,” she managed, her lips dry. “He was definitely there? He was the one taking the photograph?”
Ezra nodded.
“So he’s my . . .” But she could not say the word aloud. She shut her eyes, pressing her fingers to her temples, trying to see him. There was nothing of herself in his face—but perhaps that was not surprising. When she opened her eyes and stared down at the photograph on the table, it was her own face she saw, in her mother’s. She was her mother’s daughter, through and through.
It was as if her mother had erased her father’s DNA through sheer force of will.
“Hal—don’t,” Ezra said awkwardly. He looked profoundly uncomfortable and ill-equipped to be having this conversation, and Hal could tell that every atom of him would have rather got up and walked into the night, but that he was steeling himself to see this through. “Don’t jump to conclusions, it’s just a picture.”
But Hal had spent too long reading the diary, too long puzzling it out, to believe him. It was the only way it made sense. Edward—the man taking the picture—was her father. And for some reason Abel was desperate to conceal that fact. Desperate enough to tell a lie he must have known would come home to roost at some point.
“I don’t get it,” Hal said. She looked down. Her fingers were crushing the paper cup of coffee, and she forced them to release. “Why would he lie?”
“I don’t know.” They sat in silence for a long minute, and then Ezra, with an effort, put out his hand to Hal’s shoulder. “Hal, are—are you okay?”
“I’m not sure,” she whispered, and for a moment he rested his hand there and she felt the warmth of his fingers striking through her jacket, and she had a great urge to turn and cry into his shoulder. There was silence as she struggled to master herself.
Then Ezra let his hand drop and the moment was broken. He picked up his cup and took a long gulp of coffee, then made a face.
“God, I wish I could have a proper drink. I’d kill for a glass of red, right now.”
“There’s a restaurant over the other side of the food court,” Hal said, but he shook his head.
“Better not. I’m tired enough. Though of course there’s nothing stopping you, if you want one.”
“I don’t,” Hal said, rather awkwardly. “Drink, I mean.”
Ezra picked up the paper cup and sipped again, looking at her over the top with his dark eyes. They were nearly coal-black, a brown so deep that the pupil and iris merged almost into one.
“What’s the story behind that, then?”
“No story,” Hal said, automatically defensive, and then she felt bad. There was no truth to hide anymore, no point in holding her cards close to her chest. And this man had been kind, and had told her the truth where others had lied, and was going above and beyond his duty to try to get her home. She owed it to him to repay his honesty in kind. “Well, a bit of a story, to be honest. I mean, I’m not in AA or anything like that, but I just found . . . it was after my mother died. Drinking stopped being fun, somehow. It became . . . it was a way of coping, for a bit. And I don’t like crutches.”
“I can understand that,” Ezra said quietly. He looked down at the paper cup, seeming to study something in the peaty depths. “Maggie was always very independent. I don’t think she really liked living with us for that reason. It was, well, a kind of charity, I suppose, and Mother never let her forget it. There was always this unspoken feeling that she needed to earn her place by being grateful, or some kind of bullshit.”
“What—” Hal felt her breath catch in her throat. “What was she like, Ezra, when you knew her?”