Suddenly it made sense, why they’d been so blinkered about me rushing into things, so negative about the relationship in the first place. They’d known our marriage contained a secret that turned out to be deadly.
All I could think of when I looked at them was that if my ShayKi brother and sister had told me – or at least told me enough, so that I asked Leo for the rest – my husband would not have died. My baby would have had a chance to meet their father.
I left them at the hospital entrance and went back to my new home, alone.
31
BECKETT
Beckett was a mess. He’d faced worse, obviously. Turning up at the hospital to find Gramps in Intensive Care, barely alive after the stroke. Overhearing the phone call that ended his engagement to Rebecca. But the way Mary had stepped into that man’s arms, as though coming back home, had felt like watching all his tender hopes and dreams crash and burn.
Bob had this man’s eyes.
Mary’s reaction at the register office had convinced him there’d been a husband.
Now, here he was to claim his wife and son, and Mary had embraced him as though the past few months had never happened.
As though that kiss had never happened.
Of course she did, you clown.
Beckett berated himself for being selfish enough to feel so aggravated as he drove home and spent a painstaking hour getting Gramps into bed. His grandfather was hard work that evening, belligerent and rude, fussing and griping. When Beckett allowed a shred of exasperation to leach into his tone, as Gramps tried to insist upon looking for a pair of socks that Beckett repeatedly assured him were halfway through a washing-machine cycle, Gramps stared defiantly at the floor and barked, ‘Stick me in a home where I belong. Why force both of us to endure this misery?’
Beckett breathed deeply, counted to five and reminded them both that he’d made a promise not to do that, and nothing would make him break it. They’d have help again soon enough.
The endless Mary loop continued, as soon as he’d left Gramps in bed. He’s her husband. You’re a guy she met at a vulnerable moment a few weeks ago, who she happened to kiss, once. A part-time taxi driver. With no money, and no life outside your job and taking care of your ailing grandfather.
Ugh. The man had been driving a Lexus.
Still, he’d better have a heck of an excuse for abandoning his pregnant wife. It was clear there’d been zero contact since.
Beckett poured himself a whisky and turned his phone off, the urge to search for answers online stronger than ever.
After tossing and turning for hours, eventually drowning out with another large whisky the tormenting thoughts about what Mary and her probably-no-longer-ex were doing right then, Beckett snapped awake at four. Instinctively, he sensed something had woken him up. The kind of thing that always meant trouble. With a weary groan, he hauled himself out of bed and pulled on jeans and the Grinch jumper he’d worn to the rehearsal. Heart sinking, but not yet alarmed, he found Gramps’ bed empty, along with the rest of the house. His pulse picked up when he found the back door locked, the front one not quite closed properly.
Wrenching it open, he sprinted down the path and scanned the street in both directions, looking for huddled shapes, misplaced shadows, an old man who could barely walk stumbling along in the freezing darkness.
His curses barely squeezing past the tension in his throat, he threw on his coat, grabbed his phone and Gramps’ parka, still hanging on the rack by the door, and raced back out.
He managed the first few minutes without descending into complete panic, expecting to spot his grandfather any second, already anticipating the flood of relief when he found him.
As more seconds ticked by, the sense of dread suddenly grew overwhelming. Beckett tried to force himself into doctor mode, removing any emotion from the situation and thinking logically. Easier said than done, when it was his only relative and not a random patient.
‘Where the hell have you gone, Gramps?’ he mumbled to the empty street, turning his phone back on. He called Mary. Yes, she had bigger things going on, but she also loved Gramps, and would have as good an idea as anyone where he might have wandered off to.
Who was he kidding? The truth was, her voice was about the only thing that would keep him from completely losing it right now.
No answer.
He carried on pacing along the road, searching frantically as he dialled a different number.
‘What’s up, my friend?’ Moses sounded wide awake. ‘Just trying to get Tabitha to accept Santa isn’t coming for four more sleeps, so it couldn’t have been reindeer she heard on the roof.’ He paused for a second. ‘Nope. Or sleigh bells. Sorry, sweetie.’
‘Gramps is missing.’
Moses instantly switched tones. ‘Fill me in.’
Within half an hour, the police had been informed and there were five men – five! Beckett hadn’t even met Clive before, but he was a retired police officer, so had offered to help – scouring the Bigley streets in a systematic grid formation that allowed Beckett to hold on to a paltry shred of hope that they’d find Marvin before he froze to death.
