Page 56

NOW

August 2023

Lily

Phibsborough, Dublin

The room was heavy with stunned silence as Lily and her family tried to process the shocking revelations her mother and Sally had outlined.

Lily’s mum wasn’t Kimberly, but instead a woman called Elsie. Who used to be Sally’s best friend. This new information made Lily’s head spin as she struggled to comprehend what else might have been hidden.

‘You were supposed to come to Ireland with me,’ her mum said to Sally accusingly. ‘If you’d come with me, none of this would have happened.’

‘How dare you!’ Sally replied, her eyes flashing fire. ‘I told you it wasn’t safe to leave in that moment. I had to do what was best for Zach! For my child.’

‘I know you believe that, Sally, but I had to protect him from Baldwin. He would have killed you both.’

‘I would never have allowed that to happen. I was always going to leave, but you never gave me the chance. You took matters into your own hands, leaving me behind to deal not only with the horror of my son’s abduction but my husband’s anger too.’ Sally’s voice trembled with the accusation.

Lily’s head spun as both women screamed at each other, about how they’d done what was best for Zach. How could they think, for one second, that any of this was okay? She looked at her mother in disbelief.

Who was she?

‘How could you do this to your best friend? Snatch a child from her like that? It’s barbaric,’ Lily said, her voice quivering with emotion.

‘You don’t understand,’ her mum replied, her eyes pleading with Lily to see it from her side. ‘I was sure if I took Zach it would force Sally’s hand to follow me. And then we could go on with our plan – the three of us – together. Reggie was supposed to tell Sally where to find me.’

Zach stepped forward, his face ashen and his upper lip beaded with sweat. ‘Why didn’t you follow her, Mom? What happened after Elsie left?’

The tension in the room was palpable as everyone waited for an answer.

Sally turned to her son, ‘I went back down to the salon a few minutes later, wondering why Elsie and you hadn’t joined us upstairs. I don’t think I can ever explain the horror when I saw your empty pram. At first, we thought Elsie had taken you for a walk. But it became clear as the minutes became half an hour, that wasn’t the case. Nicola explained what little she knew about Elsie and Reggie’s plan, and we eventually put two and two together. I was dumbfounded that Elsie had taken you. And I had no clue where she had disappeared to.’

‘Why didn’t you ask this Reggie fella?’ Lily asked.

‘Oh we tried, but he disappeared too. Nicola asked some of Reggie’s friends from the Grove, and they said Reggie had had to go into hiding. Word on the street was that he was about to be nicked for aggravated burglary,’ Sally said. ‘It was as if Elsie and Zach had disappeared into thin air.’

‘Call the Gardaí. Let them sort all this out,’ Gaga said suddenly. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his mobile phone. ‘I want it on record that my son had nothing to do with this.’

Zach reached for Kevin’s arm and laid a hand on it. ‘Please, sir. Not yet. I need to hear what happened next. Once we’ve heard it all, you can do what you want.’

Lily felt her head swim. All this time, they’d thought her mum was the victim when all along she was the perpetrator.

Sally looked at Lily’s grandfather. ‘For what this woman did to me, she deserves to be locked up for life, but Zach is right. It’s time for answers that I’ve waited over forty years to hear. How could you do that to me , Elsie? We were as good as sisters. And yet you never got in touch, not a postcard or a phone call to let me know Zach was okay.’

Lily’s mum could only hang her head, at a loss for words.

Zach held the bridge of his nose as if in pain. Lily understood. An ache pierced her temples as the revelations kept on coming.

‘What did my father . . . this Baldwin man . . . do when he found out I was taken by Elsie?’ Zach asked.

Sally’s face darkened, and she bit her lip as she steadied herself to respond. ‘I wanted to tell him and the police that Elsie had taken Zach, but Nicola talked me out of it. She insisted that Elsie had a plan and we should trust her. I had no choice but to go along with that, figuring that if I gave the police her name it might jeopardise my chance to follow Elsie and Zach. So I placed my trust in the person I was closest to.’ Sally laughed without merriment. ‘What a fool I was.’

The room was silent, save for the laboured breaths from Kimberly.

Lily looked over at her father, who was quiet – too quiet. Surely, he had something to say about this? He had to be angry, because Lily felt fury begin to dance its way through her.

‘Nicola and I told Ian and the police the truth, that we’d gone upstairs for a few moments, but when we returned Zach had gone. We left Elsie out of the story. The assumption was that someone had sneaked in and snatched the baby. Ian accused me of being an unfit mother, leaving Zach on his own in the salon. A nationwide search was put in place, but of course Zach was nowhere to be found. Meanwhile, I was vilified in the press. Every newspaper raked through my past, from the orphanage, to my prostitute mother and her murder. Nobody cared that I was grieving and heartbroken.’ Sally wiped tears away and continued, her voice trembling. ‘I didn’t have to worry about leaving Ian after all, because he disowned me. My sordid past, which he’d worked so hard to hide from everyone, was now public knowledge. He wanted nothing to do with me.’

Zach wiped tears from his eyes as he listened to his mother speak. Lily’s heart constricted, watching the pain he was obviously in.

Sally’s voice dropped to a whisper. ‘Ian left me with one last gift before he – literally – kicked me out of our home. I was lucky to leave alive.’ She lifted her long blonde hair to reveal a faded scar.

‘You said that was from a childhood accident – that you fell off your bike,’ Zach whispered.

Sally shook her head sadly and for the first time since she’d arrived she began to cry.

‘You should be ashamed of yourself,’ Gaga angrily shouted at Lily’s mother, his face bright red. He pointed to Sally’s scar. ‘You might as well have struck her yourself. What you did to that woman . . . I’m ashamed of you.’

Zach pulled his mother into his arms and held her close. She lay her head on his shoulder as he gently stroked the back of her hair. The tenderness of the moment brought a lump to Lily’s throat. The love between them was undeniable and starkly contrasted to Lily’s relationship with her own mother.

Yesterday, when her mum had held her in her arms, it had taken her breath away. She’d not been embraced like that in years. And now she wasn’t sure she would ever want to be ever again.

Lily’s mum walked to her side, as if she sensed that Lily was pulling away from her. ‘I swear when I left London it was a spur-of-the-moment decision. I didn’t plan any further than getting Zach away from Baldwin. Then, when your dad assumed I was Kimberly, I was afraid to correct him.’

Lily desperately wanted to understand her mother’s motives as genuine. But she shook her head in denial at these words. ‘No, Mum! When Sally didn’t arrive in Dublin, did you attempt to check if she was okay? Were you not worried that her crazy husband, that you had no choice but to save Zach from, had killed her ?’

‘Excellent question,’ Gaga said in approval.

Her mum’s face flushed and she looked over to Lily’s dad, her face softening with affection. ‘I wanted to. Of course, I did. But the thing was I fell in love with your dad.’ Her mum offered this as if it were an acceptable explanation.

This finally sparked a reaction from Lily’s dad. He looked up, as if he were awakening from a dream.

‘Was any of it true?’ he asked, his face ashen and grey.

‘Of course, Jason. The way I felt about you . . .’

Lily scoffed in response. ‘All those stories of a childhood spent fishing at Loch Lomond with your parents. The house in Glasnevin that used to be our grandparents’ before they moved to Glasgow.’

‘I made that all up,’ her mum admitted, tears now filling her eyes.

Lily’s head continued to throb as she tried to push aside the things her mother had shared.

Somewhere, hidden beneath the murky words, was another dark truth.

She could feel it.

Michael hovered close by, and Ben reached for Lily, saying, ‘Mama.’ He quietened at once when Lily took him in her arms.

‘All this time, we’ve been searching for my brother when he wasn’t ours to lose in the first place,’ Lily said, feeling nauseous at the thought.

‘I loved Robert like he was my son,’ her mother whispered. Then she moved to her ex-husband and took his hand in hers. ‘Our son.’

‘You should have told me,’ her dad replied, and then to Lily’s shock he placed an arm round her mum. ‘And while I’ll not condone what you did, taking Zach, I know you would have done it from a place of love.’

Lily felt anger prickle her forearms. How could her father still be excusing his wife? Why wasn’t he angry with her?

Then a terrifying thought struck Lily and she said, ‘When Robert went missing from our cabin, you must have at least suspected that Sally took her son back.’

Her mother’s face blanched even further. She ignored her daughter and turned to her husband again, looking for his reassurance. ‘I couldn’t say anything to Inspector Ortega because then he would have known about what I’d done. And I was so scared I’d lose you and Lily. You understand, don’t you?’

Her dad’s arm dropped from round her mum’s shoulders.

‘What if Inspector Ortega had arrested my son? Would you have spoken up then?’ Gaga asked, his voice like ice, slicing through the tension in the room.

‘Of course,’ her mum answered. ‘I told Ortega repeatedly that Jason was innocent.’

‘She did,’ Jason said. ‘And if Kimberly had known for sure that Sally had taken Robert she would have told me that. Wouldn’t you, love?’

Her mum nodded mutely.

However, none of this added up for Lily. Zach, too, seemed to be struggling to make sense of the pieces.

‘You are saying that you didn’t know that my mom took me from your cabin?’ Zach asked accusingly.

Lily watched her mother and Sally stare at each other. Lily’s mum was the first to break eye contact, when she finally answered Zach.

‘If I’m honest, I did suspect it for a little bit, but I didn’t know for sure. I mean, I hoped it was Sally that took you, rather than the other horrifying option, that you’d fallen overboard.’

‘Lies drip from your mouth so easily. How can you sleep at night?’ Sally said.

‘I don’t sleep,’ her mum replied sadly. ‘I lost so much forty years ago and I’m begging you not to take the crumbs of my life now.’

But Sally wasn’t listening to her old friend.

‘The time for secrets is over, Elsie. It’s time to tell them everything.’

And then Sally brought them all back to 1983 for one last time . . .