The Liar's Daughter by Claire Allan

Author:Claire Allan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2019-12-13T17:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Heidi

Now

Still married? After all these years? I don’t understand. My brain doesn’t process what Marie is saying.

‘I suppose we just never got round to it, and there didn’t seem so much of a reason after …’ Her voice trails off.

I know what she means to say. That there didn’t seem to be much of reason after my mother died. Marie’s replacement was gone – no longer a threat.

Joe didn’t ever have another serious relationship after that. There was no one who wanted to usurp her role as Joe’s wife and clearly she was happy to retain the title.

‘The notion of divorce never really rested easy with Joe,’ she says and I truly wonder if I am going mad.

This man who left his wife, his daughter, and inveigled his way into my family, into my mother’s bed – wasn’t really comfortable with the idea of divorce? He’d a funny way of showing it.

‘Yes, well, he was a religious man, a good man,’ Father Brennan says, and I can no longer sit and listen to these platitudes or resist the urge to run to my daughter.

I get up without speaking, because I don’t trust myself not to say something that will be used against me in the future.

I am furious like I have never been furious before. I can feel the anger surge in me as if it is running through my very veins. I’m angry not only on my behalf, but also on behalf of my mother – who loved him. Who trusted him. Who sat down and wrote in her will that this man she had known just over a year could stay in the house she owned until he remarried or passed away. This man who had no intention of ever remarrying. Or unmarrying anyone.

I wonder, did my mother, my beautiful, trusting, kind-hearted mother know that he had never divorced Marie? That he found the idea of divorce uncomfortable. That he was a hypocrite of the highest order – knelt at the altar rails every morning and prayed while he betrayed, lied to and hurt everyone he came into contact with. How could Marie be so calm? How could she be so forgiving of him? After all he had done?

Maybe she liked that she always had some sort of a connection to him – one more than sharing a child together, which was clearly not enough for her – but to be his wife? To have had, all these years, one up on the woman he left her for? My hands are curled into fists and I know I’m stomping up the stairs to find my daughter in this unfamiliar house, and I know I have to calm down before I reach Lily because she will feel the tension radiating off me in massive waves.

I reach an open door at the top of the stairs where Ciara is cooing at my daughter and for a second I feel myself relax, but then I notice the small, navy leather-bound book at her side.

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