Romany explained where she was and what she hoped to do next and he listened attentively. As they talked, they wandered closer to the shoot to watch what was going on. The photographer now had the models lying down in the breakers at the edge of the water. Romany had no idea how they kept smiling as the icy water lapped at their naked skin. A couple of them were looking quite blue. Daniel stuck at her side, and she was grateful because even though there wasn’t much conversation, it made it look like she was there with a purpose rather than just being a hanger-on. Every so often he would give Hope a wave or a thumbs-up sign, and she would either ignore him or give him a half-smile in return, her lips pressed tightly together as if she didn’t have time for the full smile.

  By lunchtime it seemed to be all over. The models were back in their clothes and drinking steaming cups of hot chocolate, which Daniel distributed in small espresso-sized cardboard cups. Hope was peering at what they’d got on a screen set up a little way away from the water and chatting through the shots with the photographer.

  ‘They look pleased,’ said Romany, nodding towards Hope who was smiling properly for the first time that morning. ‘They must have got what they wanted.’

  Daniel agreed. ‘Looks that way. Hope usually gets what she wants,’ he added, and winked at Romany.

  She liked him, she thought. She liked his humour and his positivity. But mainly she liked how much he seemed to love Hope. It glowed around him. She could see no indication that Hope felt the same way, although she was so closed it would be hard to tell, but she assumed that she did. Romany liked what their relationship appeared to be: two people, independent and yet connected, each supporting the other whilst at the same time getting on with their own stuff. Maybe that was why her mum had given Hope the task of instructing her on relationships. She hoped so, because if ever she found herself in a relationship, she would like it to look a lot like this one.

  Daniel was a totally different kettle of fish to private Hope, though. He seemed to wear his feelings on his sleeve where everyone could see them. From their conversation that morning there seemed to be no edge to him. He just said what he thought. It was refreshing. Romany was so used to people trying to hide what they felt from her, in case she might not be able to cope. Daniel just seemed to be natural and happy in his own skin. She liked it.

  Time ticked on and Romany started to get a bit twitchy about the pile of revision that was waiting for her at home. She hadn’t expected to be gone for the whole day. Daniel seemed to be the same. He kept looking at his watch and shuffling from foot to foot, but Hope was showing no sign of being finished. She was deep in conversation with someone on her phone whilst things wound up around her.

  ‘I’m going to head back to York,’ said Daniel. ‘I like to support Hope wherever I can, but I’ve been gone long enough. I really need to get back to my kitchen. I can give you a lift if you like,’ he added to Romany.

  Romany didn’t know what to do. The offer of a lift home was very welcome, but she didn’t want Hope to think she was being rude or ungrateful.

  Daniel seemed to read her mind. ‘Don’t worry about Hope,’ he said. ‘We can’t interrupt her now, but I’ll text her to tell her that I’ve taken you back. She’ll be fine with it. In fact, she’ll barely notice we’ve gone.’

  He waved over at Hope, blew her a kiss and then pointed at Romany and flashed his thumb in the direction of the car. Hope nodded, smiled at Romany and then turned her back on them both to continue her phone conversation.

  ‘There you go,’ said Daniel. ‘Sorted.’

  Daniel’s car was a black Audi. Smart, functional, dull. It wasn’t that tidy inside, however, with empty coffee cups and the packaging of a couple of pre-packed sandwiches rolling around on the back seat.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Eating on the run. Occupational hazard. You’d think, working with food all day . . .’

  He looked at her regretfully, but Romany just shrugged. She wasn’t going to lose her shiz over a bit of rubbish.

  As they drove back, he quizzed her in a little more detail about her plans for the next year, what she wanted to do when she graduated, and Romany was happy to tell him all. He seemed impressed, and it made her feel proud, as it often did, that she had got this all together despite what had happened to her mum.

  They reached the turn-off for the house and Romany was about to give directions when he flicked on the indicators and turned anyway.

  ‘You know where I live?’ she asked.

  He hesitated for a moment. ‘Yes. Hope was going to get me to pick you up this morning but then the plans changed, and we ended up swapping over.’

  He found a parking space not far from her house and slid the car neatly into it. Romany went to open the door and was about to say thank you when he spoke, his voice urgent as if he really needed to get the words out.

  ‘Listen, Romany,’ he said, his hand rubbing his chin. ‘There’s something that I should probably tell you.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ replied Romany, her hand resting on the door handle. ‘What’s that then?’

  For the first time that morning he looked awkward, his easy confidence of earlier gone.

  ‘It’s just that, I knew your mum, back when . . . Well. I knew her.’

  52

  Romany’s hand fell away from the door handle. She was all ears. Meeting someone new who had known her mum, particularly in the days before she had been around, was a rare treat.

  ‘Did you?’ she asked, curious. ‘How come?’

  ‘You know those trees I mentioned,’ he said. ‘Well, me and your mum, we were in the same trees.’

  Romany eyes grew wide. ‘Really! That’s so cool! Mum always said it was one of her favourite times, being on that protest.’

  Daniel nodded, his smile fond and distant. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘It had its moments. It was tough, especially when it got cold. But we had a camaraderie thing going on. We were all in it together, with this one common purpose, to save the woods. We were so sure we’d win, that the government would see the sense in what we were saying. We were naïve, I guess, but we were bloody good at climbing trees.’

  Romany bit her lip. ‘Can I ask you a question?’ she said.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What was Mum like back then?’

  Romany loved talking about her mum. She hardly ever got the chance, because everyone assumed that she would want the complete opposite, and most people avoided the subject as if it might explode if they touched it. And here was someone who had known her before she’d even been born. Of course, she’d heard things from back then – Maggie and Tiger never shut up about the old days when they got together – but she knew all their stories as well as if she had been there herself. Daniel was offering a peep into a totally new area of her mum’s life. It was too tantalising to miss.

  Daniel flicked off his seatbelt and pushed his seat back so that he could stretch his legs. The mention of her mum brought a warmth to his smile. He had really liked her, back in the day, Romany could tell just from that expression.

  ‘Your mum was like a force of nature,’ he said. ‘She just didn’t care what others thought of her. She did what she thought was right. She was completely chaotic though. Was she like that later too?’

  Romany thought of the mess the flat used to get into, the way her mum never had what she needed when she needed it, her refusal to ever make a plan and then her frustration when things didn’t work out the way she wanted. She nodded.

  ‘Yeah. Pretty chaotic,’ she said with a smile.

  ‘And she was loyal,’ Daniel went on, his eyes focused on the bins further down the street. ‘If you were on her team, she’d do whatever it took to make sure you were okay. Did she tell you about her own mum?’

  ‘A bit,’ said Romany.

  Daniel nodded. ‘Well, she had a pretty hard time growing up. I think that’s why she never made plans. There just hadn’t been any point when her life was so out of her own control. But I also think that was why if she found you and she liked you, then you could never quite shake her off. She stuck like glue and she would defend you against anyone. Like I say, loyal.’

  Romany loved hearing this kind of thing and it fitted so neatly with her own understanding of her mum, so she knew he wasn’t stringing her along.

  ‘Did you two go out?’ she asked, shyly.

  Daniel, still staring resolutely out of the windscreen, nodded again.

  ‘We did, actually,’ he said, although Romany knew they must have done because of the way he was talking. She would guess that the two of them had been pretty close.

  ‘That’s cool,’ she said. ‘And how weird that you should be going out with one of Mum’s friends now. That’s a mad coincidence.’

  Daniel turned his head and looked at her out of the tail of his eye.

  ‘It is,’ he said. ‘But not in the way that you think.’

  Romany was confused. ‘How do you mean?’ she asked.

  ‘Well,’ he began slowly, ‘the coincidence isn’t so much that I knew your mum. It’s more that I was going out with someone that she met on a course.’

  Romany didn’t really follow, but it didn’t matter. The main thing was that she had increased the number of people she could talk to about her mum.

  ‘Actually,’ Daniel continued, ‘it is a coincidence that me and Hope are together, and that your mum met Hope, but the reason I moved to York in the first place was to be closer to your mum.’

  He turned his head further still so that she could see his face.

  ‘And you . . .’ he added.

  A hush fell. Now he stared straight into her eyes the way he had done in the restaurant on Christmas Day. Romany blinked and then blinked again. Daniel was obviously trying to make a point, but she wasn’t following. Why would he want to be near her?

  ‘Romany,’ he began. He paused, rubbing his hand over his mouth, and took a deep breath.

  But she was there.

  She had got it.

  She knew exactly what he was trying to tell her.

  And suddenly there wasn’t enough oxygen in the confined space. She threw the car door open, making a passer-by jump and then swear at her indignantly. She had to get away. She didn’t know for certain what he was about to say but she didn’t want to hear it. She ran from the car without closing the door and straight to the flat, fumbling for her key in her jacket pocket. She threw a look over her shoulder, but he wasn’t following her. He was still sitting in exactly the same spot, as if frozen in time.

  The key turned, the door swung open and Romany fell into the flat and slammed the door behind her.

  53

  Romany stood with her back against the door. Her breath was a ragged panting, and her heart was pounding so hard that it hurt. She squeezed her eyes shut while she tried to calm herself. A voice was speaking to her in her head and she knew it was her mum.

  ‘Slow down, Romey,’ she said. ‘Focus on the breath. In through the nose. Out through the mouth.’

  Romany tried to do what her mum had taught her, but it wasn’t working. How could she make herself calm in the light of what she thought she’d just worked out? Was Daniel her dad? Was that what he had been about to tell her?

  She tried to bring to mind all the things that her mum had ever told her about her dad, but there wasn’t much, just that they had loved each other very much, but that it hadn’t worked out. When Romany was younger and pressed for more details, her mum had just shaken her head and said that she would tell her everything she wanted to know when she was old enough. And then when she had been old enough, she hadn’t wanted to know, had refused, in fact, to listen.

  So now, she had nothing to go on, no way of verifying what she thought Daniel was trying to say. She tried to picture his face, to see if she had ever felt that there was anything familiar about it, but nothing came to mind. He was just Daniel, Hope’s chef boyfriend, nice enough on the surface but with nothing to suggest that they shared DNA.

  But he had known Mum. That she did believe. Her mum had told the tree stories over and over because Romany loved to hear them. She could accept that her mum and Daniel had been there in the tree-top camp together. She was even prepared to believe that they had gone out together back in the day. But this? It was too much to take in.

  From upstairs she could hear Tiger calling down to her. ‘Is that you, Romey? Have you had a good time?’

  And then, when she didn’t appear within the time he would have expected, his head appeared at the top of the stairs and he peered down at her.

  ‘What are you doing down there?’ he said, laughing at her. And then, ‘Hey. What’s up?’

  Romany didn’t speak because she didn’t know how to start. She stayed where she was against the door with her eyes tightly shut like she’d done as a child when she wanted something to go away. She could hear Tiger making his way down the stairs towards her, but she was frozen to the spot.

  ‘Come on, Romes,’ he said as he got closer. ‘What’s this all about? Did something happen with Hope? Has she upset you?’

  There wasn’t much room in the porch area; Tiger stayed where he was on the second step, so that when Romany opened her eyes she had to look up at him. The space felt enclosed and intimate.

  ‘Did you know my dad?’ she whispered.

  There was a pause, a heartbeat before Tiger replied.

  ‘Ah,’ he said.

  What was that supposed to mean? She hadn’t talked to the guardians about her dad for the same reasons that she’d refused to talk about him to her mum. But maybe they all knew, and it was just she who didn’t. In fact, that would make sense. They’d all been friends since they were teenagers. They were bound to know.

  Apart from Hope, of course. How Hope fitted in had always been unclear to Romany and, she suspected, to them all. But was this it? Maybe it wasn’t Hope that her mum had wanted to be part of Romany’s life, but Hope’s boyfriend?

  ‘What do you mean, “Ah”?’ she asked. Her voice sounded harsh and she realised that she was building up to being angry.

  ‘I met your dad once,’ said Tiger. ‘Before you were born.’

  ‘And . . .’

  Tiger made a face that said, what else do you want me to say? ‘He seemed all right. A nice enough bloke. I mean, I literally met him once.’

  ‘Is Daniel . . . Hope’s Daniel,’ she clarified, ‘is he my dad?’

  Tiger paused, ran his tongue over his teeth whilst he decided what to say.

  ‘Yes. I think so.’

  ‘You think so?!’ said Romany, her voice suddenly louder and bordering on a shout.

  Tiger ran a hand over his chin, apparently considering his next answer, and Romany felt a hot ball of fury building in her chest as she watched him decide what to tell her.

  ‘Yes, then,’ he said. ‘He is. I thought I recognised him in the restaurant on Christmas Day, but I couldn’t place him. He didn’t seem to know me, and obviously he didn’t say anything so . . . But I’ve thought about it since then and, yeah, I think he is.’

  ‘And you were going to tell me when, exactly?’

  He let out a sigh and looked at her forlornly. ‘Oh come on, Romey. Don’t shoot the messenger, mate? What was I supposed to do? I thought it was him, but I didn’t know for sure. And you never seemed to want to know anything about him, so I just kept schtum.’

  ‘And what about Maggie and Leon? Do they know too?’ asked Romany accusingly.

  Tiger shrugged. ‘I mentioned it to Mags, yes. But she never met your dad. I only did by accident. So, we decided to wait and see how things played out. I mean, what with your exams and everything, it seemed like the right thing to do. Sorry if we screwed up.’

  He looked genuinely upset and Romany felt her anger lift a little.

  ‘What’s happened, anyway?’ he continued. ‘Has Hope said something?’

  ‘Not Hope,’ Romany replied, her voice breaking as she tried to hold back her sobs. ‘Daniel. He gave me a lift back and we got chatting and he said that he’d known Mum when they were young and then he said that he’d moved to York to be near her and me. And I just kind of put two and two together, and then I ran away.’ Her words all ran into one another in her rush to tell the tale, and then emotion got the better of her and she began to cry.

  Tiger put his arm around her and held her tightly. ‘Oh Romes, don’t. I can’t stand to see you sad. But just so I’m clear. He didn’t actually tell you he was your dad. In so many words, I mean?’

  Romany shook her head into his shoulder, her voice muffled by his shirt. ‘Well, no,’ she agreed. ‘Not in so many words. But it all fits, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ replied Tiger. ‘That’s what I thought anyway.’

  There was a pause whilst she tried to control her tears and Tiger continued to hold her. Then he said, ‘Do you think you should talk to him? Get it all out in the open.’

  Romany considered. Running off hadn’t been the most mature response, she conceded, but she’d been taken off guard. It wasn’t the kind of situation you had a plan for. But Tiger was right. It did need sorting out and now was as good a time as ever.

  ‘Do you think he’s still out there?’ she asked.

  ‘Only one way to find out,’ he said. ‘Let me go and see?’

  Romany gave a single nod.

  ‘And if he is, shall I bring him in?’

  ‘Okay,’ she said, a tiny tremor cracking the word in two.

  She stepped aside so that Tiger could get past her and open the door. He flicked the latch and peered out into the street. Then he went as far as the gate, but in a couple of seconds he was back.

  ‘I think he’s gone,’ he said.

  54

  It was a long time since Maggie had been nervous, properly gut-wrenchingly nervous, but she was now. It was only an interview, she told herself. She had been in hundreds before, although, to be fair, she had generally been the interviewer and not the interviewee. And it wasn’t that important. Yes, this would be a great job to get, but there would be others. Now that she had started to look, positions that might suit her seemed to be popping up all over the place. What distinguished this one was that it would be the first. This was the benchmark by which she would measure everything that came next, all the things that were currently unknown. How would she perform under pressure? How would her career gap be taken? Was her legal knowledge still up to date? What would she be like as a team member rather than a team leader? Was Maggie Summers still relevant to the legal world at all?