I took a deep breath.
‘Having read all the letters, it’s a lot clearer why things didn’t work out between you and Mum.’ I paused, choosing my words carefully. ‘Do you think it would have been different if Richard hadn’t had his accident?’
Gabe scratched his beard. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. I hated it in Nottingham as much as your mother loathed it here. Perhaps we’d have found a compromise. Scraped together the money for a deposit on a few acres in England. But I doubt it.Your mother had my heart, but I felt as though another vital part of me was back here. I don’t know, my liver, or a good chunk of lung. I was lost. Enfeebled. Certainly not the husband your mother deserved.’
‘Could you have made it work if you’d moved out of the farmhouse, converted Sunflower Barn maybe?’
He thought about this.
‘We’d have probably lasted a while longer. But your ma, she didn’t take to farming. The long, lonely days, out in all weathers. How a year’s profits can vanish in a bad storm or the nightmare of a positive TB test. And she was never comfortable with island ways.’
‘The slower pace?’
One corner of his mouth curled up. ‘Possibly. I was thinking of the, shall we say, neighbourliness.’
‘Being oblivious to the very notion of minding your own business?’
‘Aye. Gossips, she called the other island women. Busybodies, forever finding fault with those different from themselves.’
‘Was that true?’
He sighed. ‘Maybe some of them, aye. But she didn’t help by acting all proud and pretending she didn’t care to be friends with any of them, anyway.’
I nodded. ‘That sounds like Mum.’
‘It was ludicrous, Da refusing to install a phone so even speaking to each other was a huge challenge while we were apart. How could we keep going like that? I wasn’t at all surprised when the letter came asking for a divorce because she’d fallen in love with someone else.’ He grimaced. ‘Didn’t stop it feeling like she’d ripped my poor, withered heart in two, though.’
‘What?’ I sat back, dumbfounded. Was a letter – the most important letter – missing?
‘So, I knew she was set to remarry.’ Gabe didn’t seem to have noticed my reaction. ‘But I must confess that her having a child shook me. She was always so adamant about it.’
The only reply I could manage was a shaky, ‘No.’
‘She must have known, deep down, we wouldn’t make it, and that’s why she refused to even discuss children.’
‘No. She never remarried. There wasn’t anyone else,’ I spluttered. ‘She didn’t change her mind about having a baby. Her cousin turned up on the doorstep one day and left me there. Mum didn’t trust anyone else in the family with a child, and she refused to let me go to a stranger, so became my legal guardian.’
‘Well, I’ll be jiggered.’ It was Gabe’s turn to be astounded. ‘There was no other man?’
I shrugged. ‘Not unless she kept another husband a secret, but I didn’t find any evidence to suggest that.’
‘Then why would she say such a thing? Your mother never lied.’
We sat there in stunned silence, each trying to fit these new pieces into the puzzle that was Nellie Brown.
‘I guess we will never know for sure,’ Gabe concluded eventually. ‘Whatever the reason, it eases my mind a little about you and my son.’
‘Excuse me?’
It was astonishingly naïve of me, but I’d never clocked that Pip’s dad having been married to my mother might be an issue. Could we be considered ex-stepsiblings, if Mum and Gabe had ended all contact before either of us were born? Was it a problem if in reality, we were ex-step-second cousins?
‘He told me the first Christmas he came home about the pasty girl he’d fallen for. I about fell off the tractor when Violet announced he’d only gone and brought you back with him.’
‘But you know I came here because of Mum, not Pip.’
Gabe raised an eyebrow.
‘Okay. MumandPip.’ I glanced at him, suddenly nervous. ‘I’ve been talking to him about potentially staying here longer.’
