Page 15 of Forever, Maybe
Chapter eleven
T he woman’s Instagram and Facebook accounts were both set to private.
The only way to see the photos on there was to request access, and if you were bothered enough about privacy to prevent any Tom, Dick or Harry seeing your stuff, a casual, ‘hey, let’s be friends!
’ from a stranger would likely be ignored.
Chrissie let out a harrumph, and leant back against her chair, glaring at the tablet screen as if her frustration would magically change the account status and allow her a deep dive into the woman’s life. If indeed this was the right woman, and that was debateable.
“Chrissie!” her dad called from the kitchen. “What do you want me to do with the cake? I’ve taken plenty of beauty shots, but should I cut into it now?”
“Not yet!” she shouted back. “I’ll be down in a few minutes. And if Mikey comes in, do not let him anywhere near it!”
Mikey—better known as the Cake Monster—had a well-earned reputation. Chrissie still hadn’t forgiven him for the Great Biscuit Heist of three weeks ago.
Her dad, bless him, had recently decided that her side hustle might have full-time potential.
She hadn’t been so sure. The local council’s strategic support services department paid the bills but drained her soul.
Her colleagues, however, had become unwitting accomplices in her grand baking experiments.
Every Monday morning, they devoured her cakes, biscuits, tray bakes, pastries and patisserie like a pack of ravenous wolves. Their enthusiasm had been a balm to her constant grumbling about work, prompting her dad to suggest she did it for a living.
It sounded so simple when he said it. Too simple.
Go on, sell your cakes, Chrissie, he urged. I’ll help. You’ll need photos, won’t you?
Dad, the ever-enthusiastic amateur photographer, had plunged headfirst into the rabbit hole of food photography the moment she said yes to his idea.
Now, he spoke the jargon like a pro. “Beauty shots,” he’d informed her with the seriousness of a seasoned professional, referred to photos taken directly above or in front of a dish to showcase it in all its glory.
They were a must-have for anyone advertising a food business online.
Her father had always had an artistic streak, which frequently manifested in creative home projects.
Chrissie’s bedroom, where she sat now, had undergone countless transformations over the years, each one brought to life by her dad following her exact specifications.
From the pink princess explosion of her childhood to the modern-day statement wallpaper on the back wall, offset by the plain, muted tones of the surrounding walls, every phase bore his signature touch.
She’d even broached the subject with the family-appointed counsellor once. Do you think he does this to compensate?
Infuriatingly, the counsellor had flipped the question back at her. What do you think?
She’d rolled her eyes at the time but knew the answer. Probably. Dear old Alan Gordon, overcompensating for the fact that her biological parents had given her up for adoption as a newborn. He’d tried to fill every gap, every imagined deficiency, by giving her exactly what she wanted.
“Daddy, I want unicorns!” she’d demanded as a starry-eyed six-year-old.
The next weekend, he’d painted a mural on her bedroom wall featuring a parade of unicorns so lifelike you could almost hear their hooves clatter.
Some looked fierce, others bewildered, some even amused or frightened.
It was magical, if a bit unsettling to fall asleep under the wary gaze of a startled unicorn.
Then, when as a snotty teenager, unicorns were no longer cool, he painted the wall black, adding gold stencils and uttered not a word when she covered one newly blank wall in black and white posters of musicians, photographs of polar bears and sayings she thought were cool.
These days, she preferred the simple elegance of a dark red flowers patterned wallpaper on the back wall, her queen-sized bed pushed up against it, book shelf above, a two-seater sofa at the end and a corner desk.
And the counselling? Long gone. The woman had helped her work through the deeper layers of rejection but not nearly as much, Chrissie might argue, as being adopted by two exceptional human beings: open and honest, kind and endlessly understanding.
She hit the refresh button once more, grimacing as her screen flashed up the same message. This user only allows friends to see their posts.
Never mind, there was more than one way to drown a cat.
She typed the woman’s name into Google. The search engine burst into activity, returning five results with the name at the top, all of which were on LinkedIn.
The first ran a human resources consultancy business in the Lake District.
Chrissie’s thumb hovered over the link. If she clicked on it, the woman would be able to tell someone had checked her out and might be able to figure out who that person was.
Unlikely, but a potential risk.
The other LinkedIn woman ran a dog-walking service. Now that was more like it. Chrissie typed the woman’s name into Google along with ‘dog walking’ and quickly found a small New York-based business.
“Your doggie is my doggie,” the earnest woman assured the camera in a promotional video as she strolled the streets, picking up excitable pooches from brownstone apartments.
A chorus of yaps followed her, tails wagging like metronomes.
The age checked out, but there was one glaring difference—this woman was Black, whereas Mikey, as Chrissie often teased him, was so Celtic-pale he could probably get sunburned under a full moon.
Blast it. And the woman seemed lovely, too. On her website, she urged dog owners to think beyond their pampered pups, drawing attention to the plight of stray dogs in less fortunate countries—ribby, mange-ridden creatures left to fend for themselves. She’d even established a charity to help them.
Chrissie, always a sucker for a sob story, sighed and sent ten pounds to the PayPal account, typing a quick note as she hit ‘send’: Good work! XX.
So, nope, LinkedIn would not lead Chrissie to Mikey’s mother.
Other tactics were required. Something struck her and she cursed herself for being an idiot.
What if she was looking for the wrong name altogether?
If the woman had married, she’d likely have taken her husband’s name, in which case finding her would prove much harder than she’d anticipated.
Chrissie met her biological mother at twenty-four, her heart hammering and her feet scuffing the platform as she waited for the train, the sudden weight of doubt pressing down. Was this such a good idea?
It had turned out fine. Carla Souza—her own face, aged twenty years—had even met Dad a few months later, clasping his hands in a fierce grip. “Thank you,” she’d said, voice thick with something Chrissie couldn’t name. “Thank you for raising my child.”
Chrissie flinched at the phrase my child, glancing quickly at her father to gauge his reaction. Would the possessive sting? But he simply smiled, calm and steady as always. “Chrissie is my pride and joy. Mikey, too, of course.”
That was Dad—unshakable, unfazed by anything.
Chrissie didn’t dislike her mother, exactly, but every meeting left her with the same unwavering thought: Thank God that woman didn’t raise me.
Carla, whom Chrissie could never bring herself to call Mum, radiated chaos.
Every emotion was turned up to eleven, every gesture expansive, as though she were performing on stage rather than having a conversation.
Two hours in her company felt like running a marathon on a caffeine overdose.
When they parted, Chrissie always felt a profound sense of relief, retreating gratefully into the quiet steadiness of the life her dad and late mother had built for her.
“Honey, I’m home!” Mikey’s voice rang out downstairs. When their father returned to the house after a day at the local Trading Standards office, he’d always announced himself in that manner, and Mikey kept it up, a custom the small family clung to, now that Mum was no longer on the scene.
Chrissie leapt up, slamming her laptop shut.
She hadn’t told Mikey what she was up to; he wouldn’t approve.
They had both understood from an early age that they were adopted.
Mum and Dad never hid the fact, turning it into a bonus.
We were looking for a lovely little girl and a lovely little boy, and as soon as we saw you, we knew…
But when the eighteen-year-old Chrissie had first expressed serious interest in seeking out her biological parents, her mum had told her that was absolutely fine, and then later that evening, she overheard her and Dad, talking in low voices in the kitchen, believing she was asleep upstairs.
“I know they want to know, and it’s their right, Alan,” she said, her voice thick with tears, “but I’m so frightened we’ll lose them. What if their proper parents live abroad or, or…”
“Shush, love. That’s not going to happen, and we’ve always suspected they’d want to find out, haven’t we? We have to let them.”
Chrissie’s heart twisted as her mum blew her nose. She couldn’t do that to her—couldn’t pile on more weight when she was already carrying so much.
Not long after, Mum was diagnosed with breast cancer.
It clung on for six relentless years, spreading to her lymph nodes despite the double mastectomy.
Chrissie, Dad, and Mikey were thrust into a world of hospital appointments, chemotherapy and its brutal aftermath, their home thick with the sharp tang of antiseptic—an inadequate mask for the slow, unrelenting decay of a body losing its fight.
Chrissie sniffed. She had adored her mum, and the memory of that smell made her shudder. Towards the end, her mum insisted on speaking to her and Mikey separately. “Chrissie.” The grip was stronger than Chrissie expected. “Go find your mum and dad.”
What mum , Chrissie replied, her words automatic. The only Mum I've ever had is here in front of me now.
She stood up now and opened her bedroom door. “Mikey, if you touch that cake, I’ll kill you!” she yelled. He rejoined with “Yeah? You and whose army?” and she pelted down the stairs, recognising a threat when she heard one.
In the kitchen, her father was standing in front of the pine table, a rolling pin in hand, as Mikey sparred with him jokingly, trying to get at the cake. They kept it up as she darted around them, throwing herself in a protective huddle over the cake. “No, don’t touch it!”
Sometimes she wondered if all families did this—acting out exaggerated versions of themselves—or if it was something that only happened in familial units like hers, where people sought comfort and found their identities through absurdity.
Mikey halting his hopping from foot to foot. He raised his palms in surrender. “Okay, okay, your cake’s safe!”
He was still dressed in his police uniform. The thick stab-proof vest made him barrel-chested, and the baton in its holster unthreatening, though he’d drawn it for Chrissie once, and she’d flinched, the sound a whip-crack through the air.
Their father maintained a protective stance in front of the cake. “I don’t trust him, Chrissie!”
“Neither do I,” she said, whisking the cake from the table and onto the counter.
Dad would have taken fabulous pictures, and she was super-proud of the three tier wedding cake with gold and silver petals spiralling from the top to the bottom.
The cake had not been commissioned by anyone—yet!
—but Chrissie hoped that once she uploaded the pictures on her newly established Instagram account @chrissiecakes, orders would flood in.
Then, and only then, would she allow Mikey to get his greedy mitts on it.
Her brother—jammy git—had the world’s fastest metabolism. Capable of consuming cakes, burgers, buckets of chicken nuggets and massive packets of crisps without gaining a single ruddy kilogram.
Mikey burst out laughing, the sound of it—a weird huck, huck, huck—too much for her and her dad to resist. They joined in, swallowed up in the joy of the moment, delighted to be here, to forget about the sadness of Mum’s death and rally round Dad, encircling him with love and protection.
“Who’s making dinner?” Mikey asked, swirling his fingertip in the air before theatrically pointing it at Chrissie.
“Fudge off,” she retorted. “I just spent five hours lovingly crafting this cake. My culinary energy is officially spent. It’s your turn, you blooging bucktard.”
Mikey’s eyebrows shot up and down in rapid succession, his lips quirking into a grin.
Their ongoing game of inventing substitute swear words was one of their greatest shared joys.
For all their loving tolerance, Ma and Pa had drawn a firm line at the f-word, the c-word, the b-word and a colourful assortment of others.
But that didn’t stop the siblings from creatively pushing the boundaries.
Their dad, ever perceptive, caught on and gave Mikey a light thump on the arm. “Kittens,” he offered, “I could make dinner?”
“Ah, no, no, no!” Mikey exclaimed, all mock solemnity. “The real artist in the house has done all he can for the day and should retire to the living room. Perhaps, take a small nap?”
Dad protested, half-heartedly, that he wasn’t that old, but Mikey was already herding him toward the sofa. Chrissie smirked as she uploaded the cake photos to Instagram, listening to Mikey’s exaggerated attempts to coax Dad into relaxing.
She hadn’t pressed Mikey about what happened during his conversation with Mum that time, but she knew their mother must have told him the same thing she’d told her.
That was what had set Chrissie on her current mission: tracking down the woman who had given her name to social services, signalling she was open to meeting her son—if he wanted to.
Chrissie loved the deep, bare bones of Mikey, but God, he could be infuriating.
Shutting down when anything personal came up and shoving it beneath the surface.
Typical man , as Chrissie’s friend Luce, also adopted, announced, world-weary.
It’ll come back to bite him on the bum at one point, you know.
His refusal to find out anything about his biological parents, even though your dad’s given his blessing…
Chrissie had agreed, though she hadn’t said so out loud.
And that was why, with her trademark tenacity, a bit of cunning and an unshakeable belief in her own rightness, she’d taken matters into her own hands.
Hours of combing through online records, piecing together scraps of information, all with a single goal: finding the woman named on Mikey’s birth certificate.
If Mikey wouldn’t do it, Chrissie would because sometimes love meant charging headfirst into situations, even when the person you’re doing it for might not thank you.