It seems a million times worse now I’ve said it out loud.
It is a horrible, horrible thing that is happening to Nia and Marvin. I don’t know how Nia will deal with it. Or Marvin. The thought of it, all the times they’d … My poor daughter. My poor, poor little girl.
I run for the cave exit, and stumble as I hit the rocky path that leads down through the greenery to the beach. I stumble on some of the bigger rocks before I hit the sand.
As soon as my flip-flops make contact with the hot, yellow sand, I start to run back to the resort.
I don’t know what I’m going to do when I get there, what I’m going to say, but I have to tell her. Now. I can’t leave it a moment longer than necessary. Listening to Drew talk has shown me what happens when you are a coward. When you decide to put yourself first and forget the possible hideous outcomes for other people.
‘Tessa!’ I can hear Drew calling behind me. ‘Tessa! Wait! We need to talk about this.’
I push my legs harder, force them to run faster. I don’t want to hear what he has to say. I listened to him just now and it has made everything a lot worse. When I first saw he was alive I thought that, perhaps, he’d lost his memory. That he didn’t know about me and had gone on with life not knowing that I was waiting for him. But no, that wasn’t the case. He’d been alive, he’d been well, he’d known all about me and he hadn’t come for me. He had lied, and then he had convinced himself he didn’t need to come back because I was with someone else.
That was the truth of it. It was easier for him to stay away, to start again, to let me grieve. Drew was a coward. A selfish coward. If it was true that Jake was a thug and capable of murder, then Drew had shown his weakness quite clearly by not even trying to get me away from him. He had just left me to my fate.
I do not want to talk to him, to listen to what he has to say, because I know it will be the coward’s way out of this mess.
‘Tessa! I need to talk to you!’ Drew screams. He sounds closer. He’s faster than me, probably fitter. To my left, I can see the hotel buildings coming up, and I push myself, dig deep to make it. I start to turn towards safety but Drew catches up to me. He grabs me and pulls me to a standstill.
‘Let go of me!’ I cry and try to tug my arm free. Which makes him grab both of my arms and grip me tighter. ‘Let go!’ I shout again.
‘We have to think about this,’ he shouts back at me. His grip on me increases as I try to wrestle myself free. ‘We can’t just march in there and tell them all this. It will destroy them.’
‘Let go!’ I scream.
I remember once, not long after we got together, Drew and I were on the main bit of Victoria station and he’d been faffing about, which made us miss the train back to Brighton. I made a comment about it and suddenly he grabbed my forearm in a steel-like grip. He whispered in a low scary voice not to talk to him like that. When I told him he was hurting me, he increased his grip and told me to stop making a scene. He only let me go when two guys nearby told him to. Drew had immediately apologised and said he was out of order, and wouldn’t do it again. But I knew, deep down, that I had to be careful when challenging him, that I had to think twice about criticising him – because I’d been given a glimpse of what could happen if I did.
‘Let me go!’ I shout again now, which makes him grip me even harder.
‘You need to listen to me,’ he snarls. ‘You need to listen to me about what we’re going to do.’
Using all my strength I try to pull myself away, trying to free myself from him. Suddenly he lets me go and I fall back on to the sand. ‘Will you listen!’ he screams. But before he can say anything else, I see Jake launch himself at Drew and the pair of them crash down on to the sand too. They start to fight, throwing sand up as they roll around. And then Nia and Marvin come running up the beach, closely followed by Kwame and Edward.
Marvin goes to intervene but Kwame holds him back, rightly not wanting him to get involved or hurt. I’m frozen where I sit, the sun beating down on us, watching this horror.
‘Stop it!’ Nia screams. ‘Stop it! What are you doing? Just stop it! Dad, Dad, please just stop it.’
That seems to get through to them and they break apart and look at her.
‘What are you doing, Dad?’ Nia asks, through her sobs. ‘Why are you behaving like this?’ Jake, of course – she’s talking to Jake. She’s never called him that, not in all the years we’ve been together. I always took it as her way of making a point about me not marrying him. ‘Dad, why are you trying to ruin my wedding?’
Drew screws up his face as he looks at my daughter. ‘Wait. You know I’m your father?’ he asks.
Everyone stops moving, probably stops breathing too. ‘What did you say?’ Nia whispers.
‘Nothing, nothing,’ Drew says as he realises Nia was calling Jake ‘Dad’.
‘Mum?’ Nia says to me. ‘Mum, what’s going on?’
The shock and pain in her voice make me stand up. I go to her, try to take her in my arms, but she steps away. ‘What’s going on?’ she asks again.
I can almost hear Drew silently willing me to make something up. To spare him this by lying for him.
‘Nia, I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I didn’t want you to find out like this.’
‘Are you trying to ruin it for me because your wedding went so wrong?’ she asks me.
‘No, no, of course not,’ I reply.
‘I don’t believe you. You’ve been weird ever since I told you we wanted to get married here.’
‘Nia, it’s not that, I promise you.’ I try to take her hands in mine but she snatches hers away. ‘I didn’t want you to find out like this,’ I state.
‘So it’s true? He’s—?’ Her voice cuts out.
‘Nia—’ I begin but she stops looking at me. She is staring at Drew.
She takes a step backwards. Then another. She shakes her head, all the while taking steps away from me and away from the truth. ‘No, that can’t be true,’ she says. ‘No. No. It just can’t be.’
‘I’m so sorry, Nia,’ I say.
Drew says nothing.
‘No, no, no—’ Nia turns and takes off up the slope from the beach to the resort, her sundress flapping in the breeze behind her as she runs.
Marvin is standing stock-still staring at his dad. His horror is clear on his face. He’s waiting, I think, for his father to deny it. Drew is completely focused on his son but he doesn’t say a word. Jake is staring at where Nia has just run off, clearly wondering if he should follow her.
Kwame and Edward look awkward and embarrassed. Working and living in a hotel, I’m sure they have heard all sorts of gossip over the years, but there’ll be nothing like this. I can’t worry about anyone else right now, though. I have to find my daughter.
I expected to find Nia in her bedroom, crying or throwing up in the toilet. That is what I would be doing if I were her. Instead, she is in my bedroom. When I enter my room, she is tugging open a drawer from the dresser, reaching in and throwing everything in it on to the floor.
She does the same with the other four drawers in that chest – opening them, throwing things out, slamming them shut to get to the next one.
‘What are you doing?’ I ask her.
‘Where is it?’ she screeches as she opens my wardrobe and begins pulling out shoeboxes. She empties them and then throws them aside when she doesn’t find whatever it is she’s looking for.
‘Where’s what?’ I ask.
‘The picture of him. My father. I know you won’t have got rid of it. I know it’s here somewhere.’
Then she gets to the bedside table and opens those drawers – one, two, three. In number three she finds it. The furniture had come with us from Brighton and that is the place where I have always kept the picture of Drew. Waiting for the time when Nia would ask about him. I never could have imagined she would be looking for it in these circumstances. She takes out the photo of her father and me. It was very rare to get a photo of him, even rarer to have one of us together.
Nia looks at the photo for a few seconds, her eyes searching every inch to try to find something, anything, that will tell her he isn’t related to her by blood. After she finds nothing to prove Drew isn’t her father, she drops it. ‘No, no, no,’ she says. ‘No.’ She sinks to the floor and covers her face with her hands. ‘No, no, no,’ she keeps sobbing. ‘No, no, no.’
I go to her, put my arms around her and hold her as she cries. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I say to her over and over. ‘I’m so sorry.’
Jake arrives and is about to come in, but I hold my hand up and then wave him away. This isn’t the place for him or anyone else. Right now, it needs to be just Nia and me.
Jake steps out of the room and shuts the door behind him. I take my daughter completely in my arms, then rock her back and forth, just like I did when she was a baby.