The Accidental Family (38 page)

“Especially if you eat the toast,” Mrs. Alexander reminded her gently.

“But what if his love doesn’t stick fast for me?” Sophie asked, chewing the bread that tasted like burnt cardboard in her mouth. “How will I cope with a baby on my own? I mean, I’ve got this business idea that I think will really work, but how do I start that up and have a baby, and what about the girls? I need to be near them; how will it be, my living here with Louis’s baby and Louis and the girls living in their house? Oh god, how did I get in this mess, how will I cope?”

“Well, you’ve coped perfectly well so far,” Mrs. Alexander pointed out. “People do cope, women cope—better than that, we make it right. That’s what we’re good at. Men are good at general knowledge and parking. Women are good at life—you’ve shown that already.”

“It’s just that starting my own international wedding-services company will have some of the shine taken off it if I’ve just been left at the altar, knocked up.”

“You haven’t been left at the altar,” Mrs. Alexander said. “He’ll be back.”

“And when he gets back,” Grace told her, “you can bloody kick his arse, the insensitive fool.”

Sophie wasn’t sure if it was the pregnancy itself, or simply the fact that now that she knew about it, she was suddenly exhausted. There didn’t seem to be enough hours in the day or night for her to sleep sufficiently as her body labored over making another human
life and her head and heart tried to reconcile everything that had happened to her since that moment almost a year ago when she’d found out that Carrie was dead and she was responsible for her two little girls. Telling her she was far too pale for her liking, Mrs. Alexander had sent Sophie up to her room for a nap after she’d finally eaten her toast and Sophie had fallen asleep before she’d even had a chance to think of taking a shower.

“I’ll call you when it’s time to pick up the girls, okay? You and that baby get some rest.”

She had been deep in a dreamless sleep when Mrs. Alexander came to wake her, having to resort to gently shaking her shoulder to get her to open her eyes.

“Sophie, it’s time to fetch the girls.”

Sophie sat up and rubbed her eyes. “Really? Is it one o’clock already?”

“No, love,” Mrs. Alexander said slowly. “It’s just before three. I thought I’d leave you to the last minute, you looked like you needed it.”

Sophie had to think hard for a moment about why that was a bad thing and then it hit her. Izzy finished school at one o’clock, not three. She was more than two hours late to pick her up.

“Oh god,” Sophie said, pulling on her shoes. “The school is going to kill me. They must have tried phoning Louis’s house and his cell phone and not had any luck, and they don’t have my number! How am I ever going to cope with a baby when I can’t even get them to school and pick them up on time?”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t think,” Mrs. Alexander said as Sophie raced past her and out to her car.

“It’s not your fault,” Sophie called back. “I should have remembered.” But when she reached the curb, she realized her car wasn’t there, that she had left it outside the school, and now she had less than five minutes to cover a twenty-minute walk.

“Oh no, no, no, no, no!” Sophie cried, stamping her feet on the pavement in despair. “No car!”

“Calm down,” Mrs. Alexander said, hurrying down the path in her slippers. “I’ll call you a taxi.”

“Thanks, but no, a taxi will take twenty minutes just to get here. I’ll run up there—you call the school, tell them I’m on my way.”

This time Sophie took the most direct route to the school, which was all uphill. She felt the sweat trickling down her back on the chilly afternoon even as her breath misted in the air. The sharp jab of a stitch lodged in her side and her heart pounded as she powered up the hill, forcing the deadweight of exhaustion to the back of her mind. She was still perhaps ten minutes away when children from the school started filtering past her, in ones and twos at first and then a steady stream of excited children chattering about their day to mothers, some of them scooting down the hill a little too fast for a mother’s comfort. As the hill steepened, and the downward flow of children thickened, Sophie’s progress slowed even further and it seemed it took an age for her to make the last five hundred yards. But as weary and worn out as she was, once she was in the playground she ran to the school entrance where she was sure she would find the girls waiting for her and a cross-looking teacher with her arms folded.

“I’m here,” she announced breathlessly as she skidded to a halt on the parquet tiles. But the reception area was empty except for the school secretary doing some photocopying and one of the cleaners.

“Oh, sorry, excuse me,” Sophie asked the secretary. “I’m Sophie Mills? I’m late to pick up my …my fiancé’s daughters. Izzy and Bella Gregory? I’m really late to pick up Izzy, and I’m so, so sorry. I’m pregnant, you see, and I’ve lost their father and apparently the ability to stop talking when it’s inappropriate. And now
you’re another person who knows about the baby when he doesn’t.”

The school secretary blinked at her.

“Anyway, if you could just tell me where they’re waiting?”

“They haven’t been brought here,” the secretary told Sophie hesitantly. “I haven’t heard about any late parents or …helpers today. And I would have been the one to make the calls if Izzy had still been here at one. Are you sure their father didn’t fetch them today? After all, if you’ve lost him …”

“I …I don’t know,” Sophie said, battling the rising wave of nausea and frustration surging through her.

“Try their classrooms,” the secretary suggested. “But really, don’t worry, I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about. We’re very careful here. We don’t let our children run off onto the streets on their own, you know. I bet their daddy’s got them and he just forgot to tell you. Men, hey? They never tell you anything.”

Could Louis have come back without letting her know and picked up the girls? Sophie wondered as she turned on her heel and headed toward the classrooms. That had to be what had happened. The secretary was right. The school wouldn’t just let Izzy wander off with no one to look after her. It had to mean that Louis was back, a thought that flooded Sophie with a sense of relief and fury in equal measure. What was he playing at, not letting her know he was back in town?

Sophie knew the nursery would be long empty, so she went to find Bella’s classroom where her teacher, Mrs. Sinclair, was pinning some artwork to the walls.

“Hello,” Sophie called out, breathless.

“Hello,” Mrs. Sinclair said, looking up, not pleased by the interruption.

“I just wanted to confirm that it was Louis Gregory who picked up Bella today, wasn’t it?”

“No.” Mrs. Sinclair spoke to her as if she were ever so slightly stupid.

“No?” Sophie’s heart stopped beating for a few terrifying seconds. “Then who was it?”

“It was her big brother.”

Twenty

He came at lunchtime and took Izzy,” Mrs. Sinclair explained. “I know because young Miss Aster was quite flustered by him. When they came back at three to pick up Bella, they had a huge inflatable dolphin in tow. I asked Bella about him and who he was and she told me he was her brother and that he was picking her up today. It came as a surprise to me, I didn’t know she had a big brother, but she seemed very excited about going with him. All three of them went off together.”

“Her brother picked her up,” Sophie repeated, wide-eyed with horror and a million other half-formed thoughts running through her head that she didn’t quite understand yet.

“Yes,” Mrs. Sinclair said slowly. “Is there some kind of problem?”

“Yes, yes,” Sophie said. “There is the rather large problem that she has never met her brother before,” Sophie said. “She doesn’t know anything about him. I don’t know anything about him. The
last thing I knew, he was in a dive in London, off his head on drugs and alcohol, and you just let her go with him?”

Mrs. Sinclair stood frozen to the spot. “But Bella told me he was her brother, and she’s such a sensible girl, not at all the sort to go off with a stranger.” Sophie thought of Bella’s plan to sneak out of school and make a phone call. She had been worried about how Bella would react if Louis pushed her too far, and now she knew. Izzy was tiny and trusting. Seth probably charmed her out of the young and inexperienced nursery teacher’s arms as easily as he would have charmed birds from a tree, and Izzy would not have denied that he was her brother or said she didn’t want to go with him. If anything, she would have been delighted to meet him. Bella, on the other hand, would know that Seth was not supposed to pick them up from school. Perhaps she wanted to be the one to solve the mystery and find him, or perhaps she just wanted all of her own questions and fears answered. Maybe she saw that he already had Izzy and decided she had to go with him to protect her little sister, but either way, she had decided to go with him. Whether she knew it consciously or not, Bella had made the decision to show her daddy what happened when he walked out on her. Sophie found that she had stopped breathing.

“I had no reason to be suspicious. Izzy had already been with him all afternoon. He didn’t look like he was drunk or on drugs, he was smart and clean. He looked fine.”

“No adult told you that they were going to be picked up by their brother. You shouldn’t have let them go with anyone but me or their father!” Sophie shouted at her.

“But Bella told me he was her brother, and she wanted to go.”

“She’s seven years old and Izzy is four. They don’t know when or where they should be going. Oh god.” Sophie turned away from Mrs. Sinclair as the enormity of what had happened finally hit her. “Oh god, I don’t know what to do.”

“I would never have let her go—but he already had Izzy and
she looked so happy with her dolphin. And Bella told me it was fine, she said, ‘He’s my brother’ …”

“Oh god …” Sophie struggled with the fact that she couldn’t get through to Louis, that she didn’t know Wendy’s number, and that she had no idea what Seth was like other than angry and confused and possibly on drugs and he had her two girls.

“I’ve got to find them,” she said. “I’ve got to. I’ve got to find them.”

She turned on her heel, suddenly desperate to be out and looking for them, even if she didn’t have the faintest idea where to start.

“I’ll call the police …,” Mrs. Sinclair said after her. “I’m so sorry! Bella said he was her brother …I thought it would be fine.”

Sophie ran to her car, pulling the ticket off the window and screeching when she saw that it had been clamped for a parking violation.

“No, no, no!” she shouted, kicking the car and immediately feeling it kick back through her toe and spine.

Where was Seth? Where had he taken them?

Sophie knew nothing about Seth except that his mum lived in Newquay and he went to college in Falmouth. She didn’t know if he could drive, or if he had a car. And she had no idea what he wanted with her girls. She had to think, she had to get her body and her brain moving. She had to get to them as soon as she possibly could.

Grabbing her phone she dialed Carmen’s number and held her breath while she waited for her to pick up.

“Ye Olde Tea Shoppe,” Carmen said as she picked up.

“Carmen, I’m at the school and …and Seth’s back, he’s—he’s got the girls, my car’s clamped. I don’t know where they are, I don’t know anything, or what to do …”

“Stay there,” Carmen said. “I’ll be with you in five.”

•      •      •

True to her word, Carmen walked out of the tea shop leaving a regular customer in charge and was at Sophie’s side in minutes.

“Right, let’s think,” Carmen said as Sophie scrambled into her car. “Now, we know he’s not a nut or a pervert. He’s not going to hurt them. He’s just a messed-up kid who’s done something stupid.”

“Do we know that?” Sophie asked Carmen, her heart gripped with icy fear as the car pulled away from the roadside. “Do we know he’s not going to hurt them? Because if anything happened to them because of me, I’d never …how would I? I couldn’t …”

“Shush,” Carmen told her. “The police are already looking, they were already asking around when I left the tea shop. I’ve told all my customers to keep an eye out. He won’t take them out of St. Ives, I’m sure of it. Bella wouldn’t let him; she’s done stranger danger, she knows what to do.”

“But he’s not a stranger, he’s her brother and she’ll be trying to find out about him, get to know everything—you know what she’s like.”

“No, I’m sure he’ll have taken them somewhere they know. What about the park? Let’s try the park.”

Sophie hadn’t known that the passing of time could be so agonizing. As Carmen drove her to the park, each second that passed without her being certain of the exact whereabouts of her girls dragged over her, rasping every inch of her skin as she battled with the fear of the unknown, and every moment passed too quickly, too much time slipping by between the last time she had known they were safe and now, as if they were gradually falling out of her reach.

The park was empty except for some bored teenagers leaning against the swings and spinning slowly around on the merry-go-round
as if they were gang members in L.A. and not a bunch of kids in Cornwall.

“Excuse me,” Sophie said, marching over to them, aware that the tone and pitch of her voice would instantly alienate them, high and angry as it was. “Have you seen a man, tall and dark, with longish hair, and two little girls in here this afternoon?”

“Why?” one of the boys asked her as he kicked one more revolution out of the merry-go-round. “He a pervert or something?”

“No …no, they’re my …I’m looking after them and I need to find them, please,” Sophie pleaded. “If you’ve seen them …”

“Pigs have already been round here asking,” another kid spoke up, from the top of the climbing frame. “We’ve been here since four and we’ve not seen them.”

“Really?”

“What, you saying I’m lying?” the boy challenged her.

“Sophie, come on,” Carmen called from across the park.

“Yeah, Sophie, go on,” one of the boys said.

“Hey, Sophie, got any smokes?” another one called as Sophie hurried back to Carmen.