Chapter 15: Half-Truths on the Pier

The call came at 4:47 in the morning.

I was lying on Natalie’s sofa with my shoes on, staring at the ceiling and counting the cracks in the paint. We’d got back in the early hours, shaking, sweating, the hairbrush zipped into a sandwich bag and sealed in a second one for good measure. Natalie had driven me to a twenty-four-hour clinic in Westwood, where I’d begged a bored technician for the quickest testing she had. Seventy-two hours, she’d said, sliding a form across the counter. Express. I’d paid with my mother’s money and tried not to feel like a criminal. Then Natalie had made me eat toast at her counter and I’d gone to the sofa, and sleep had refused to come.

The number on the screen was unfamiliar. I answered it so fast I nearly dropped the phone.

“Hello?”

“Amelia.” A voice, hoarse and low. “It’s Idris.”

“Idris! Are you all right? Did they—”

“They only asked questions. I said I’d seen nothing.” He sounded older than I’d ever heard him. “Miss Amelia, your father is alive.”

I sat bolt upright. Natalie, asleep on the armchair, jerked awake.

“He came to the gate at three o’clock. He walked from the bus stop on Stocker. His face was bruised, and he could hardly stand.” Idris’s voice trembled. “He said they let him go after he signed something. He has no phone. He asked me to tell you to meet him at the Santa Monica Pier, at the carousel, at six.”

“Why the pier?”

“He said you would understand.”

I did. On Sundays when I was little, before things were hard, Dad would drive us to the pier after church. Vanessa would ride the horse on the outside and I’d ride the one beside it, and Dad would stand on the platform and wave, and every time we passed he would call out, Hold on tight, my girls!

I swallowed. “Idris. Did he say whether it was safe?”

“He said it’s the only place he could think of that still felt like ours.”

We reached the pier before the sun.

The sky over the Pacific was the soft grey-pink of a seashell. The Ferris wheel stood dark and still against it, its rows of empty seats creaking in the wind. A few joggers pounded the boardwalk, and a man swept the planks with a long-handled broom. The air tasted of salt and wet rope.

Natalie hung back at a coffee cart, pretending to read a menu, one hand tucked into her jacket where her phone was ready to call 911. I walked on alone toward the carousel.

He was sitting on a bench with his back to me.

For a moment I didn’t recognise him. My father had always been a man of pressed shirts and shined shoes. This man wore a rumpled windbreaker two sizes too big, and his hair was untidy, and when he turned his head, his left eye was swollen shut. A cut ran along his lip. He looked like someone who’d been carried out of a flood.

“Amelia,” he said.

I stopped three feet away. All the speeches I’d prepared on the drive vanished. I stood and stared at him, and my chin began to tremble.

“Dad.”

He started to rise, then seemed to think better of it. “Sit with me.”

“I don’t want to.”

“I know.” His good eye closed briefly. “Please.”

I sat at the far end of the bench. Between us lay a stretch of bare wood, a few feet wide, and it felt like the whole Pacific.

“They told me you were safe,” he said at last. “I didn’t believe them. I had to see.”

“Who is they, Dad?”

“I can’t say.”

“You can’t or you won’t?”

“Both.” He rubbed his face with a shaking hand. “Amelia, I am going to tell you some things this morning. They will be true. But they won’t be everything, and I need you not to hate me for the parts I leave out.”

“I already know you took me from a hospital.”

“Yes.”

“I know you paid Dr. Watson forty thousand dollars.”

He flinched as if I’d slapped him. “Yes.”

“I know Mum knew.”

“Your mother,” he said, “was braver than I was. She tried to refuse. I did not give her the choice.”

The carousel’s calliope began to wheeze behind us as someone switched it on, a thin, cracked waltz drifting over the empty boards. A seagull landed on the rail and watched us with one yellow eye.

“I didn’t know whose child you were,” Dad said. “Not then. The doctor told me you’d been born to a young woman who’d died in labour, and that no family would claim you. I believed him because I wanted to.” His voice cracked. “It was only years later, when my mother started asking questions, that I understood the shape of what I’d done.”

“Mrs. Ruth figured it out before you did.”

“She always did.” A faint ghost of a smile touched his ruined lip. “She was the most clever woman I ever knew. When she told me she’d found the register, I begged her to stop. I said it would destroy us. She told me that was the one thing she couldn’t do.”

“So you cut her off. You moved. You told me she’d died.”

“Yes.”

I’d rehearsed rage for days, but when it came it was thin and cold. I looked at the cut on his lip. “Why?”

“Because every day she stayed in our lives was another day somebody could find out. And whoever paid Watson had a great deal to lose.” He drew a shuddering breath. “They came to me a month ago. A tall man. A grey suit. He knew everything. He told me exactly what he wanted, and what would happen if I refused.”

“What did he want?”

“Money, at first. Then something else.”

“What?”

He didn’t answer. His hand went to his ribs, and he winced.

“Dad. The theft. The transfer into my account. Was that you?”

Silence. Then, so quietly I almost lost it under the calliope: “No.”

“Then who?”

“I don’t know. I swear on my mother’s grave. I woke to that alert on my phone the same as you.” He looked at his hands. “But I won’t lie to you, Amelia. When I saw it, I knew what I could do with it. Your mother would never have agreed to send you away, and I was out of time. So I let everyone believe what the bank said. I put on my coldest face and I threw you out.”

“You used it.”

“I used it.” His eye filled. “I was going to find you the next morning and explain. I was going to put it right.”

“The transfer came from my own laptop, Dad. The one Vanessa borrowed.”

He closed his eye. “I know.”

“So she did it.”

“I don’t know that either.” His voice cracked. “I know only what I’ve been afraid to say aloud.”

“Listen, Amelia.” He took my hand. His palm was rough and shaking. “Whatever she did or didn’t do that night, Vanessa has known who you are for two years. She found your grandmother’s letters in your mother’s closet. She begged me not to tell you. I promised her.” His fingers tightened. “She isn’t what she seems, and neither is anyone else who comes to you with open arms.”

I stared at him. Two years. The photocopy in my bag felt like a stone.

Out on the water a foghorn sounded, low and long. Dad glanced over my shoulder, and his whole body stiffened.

“What is it?” I whispered.

“The man in the grey suit.” His voice dropped to nothing. “He told me last night, before they let me go. He wasn’t just the one who paid Watson, Amelia. He said something I haven’t been able to stop hearing.”

“What did he say?”

My father turned his bruised face toward mine, and in his one good eye I saw a terror so naked that it stopped my breath.

“He said,” Dad whispered, “that he was your uncle.”