What an unholy mess. It had never been supposed to end like this. Her memories of her time with him were supposed to be filled with wonder, not sorrow and despair. Losing him wasn’t supposed to hurt.
She perched on the end of the bed and twisted to face him. Blowing out a puff of air, she gazed at the ceiling.
‘My father had an affair with the au pair. She dumped me on him when I was two weeks old and has wanted nothing to do with me since. Her husband and her parents don’t know I exist.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
OTHER THAN A slight shake of his head and a tightening of his lips, Helios gave no response.
‘My birth mother had me when she was nineteen. I know very little about her—she didn’t work for them for long.’
‘When you say for them...?’
‘My parents. My mum—as in the woman who raised me—was pregnant and had a three-year-old son when they employed Neysa, my birth mother, as an au pair. She quit after a couple of months but then turned up at my dad’s workplace seven months later and left me with the receptionist.’
Amy studied Helios’s reaction carefully. She no longer really feared, as she had at the beginning of their relationship, that he would think any less of her, but nagging doubts remained. Cruel words spoken in the playground still haunted her, clouding her judgement.
‘You must have been one ugly baby for your own mum to dump you.’
‘Do you have 666 marked on the back of your head?’
‘Your real mum’s a slut.’
She’d had to force herself to rise above it and pretend the taunts didn’t affect her when in reality they had burned. For years she had tortured herself, wondering if the taunts held the ring of truth. For years she’d tried to live a life as pure as the driven snow to prove she wasn’t intrinsically bad.
For years she’d wondered how Elaine—to her mind, her mum—could even bring herself to look at her.
Helios stared at her as if she’d just told him that all the scientists and even physics itself were wrong and the world was actually flat.
‘Did she leave a note?’ he asked quietly. ‘Give a reason?’
‘Her note to my father said only that I was his and that she couldn’t keep me.’
‘So your father had an affair with the au pair when your mum was pregnant? And they’re still together?’
She nodded. ‘God knows how Mum found it in her to forgive him but she did, and she raised me as her own.’
Helios shook his head, amazement in his eyes. ‘She raised you with her own children?’
‘Yes. Danny was born five months before me. We were in the same school year.’
He closed his eyes with a wince. ‘That must have been difficult.’
‘At times it was horrendous—especially at secondary school. But we coped.’
Amy’s existence could have caused major friction between her and her siblings, but both Danny and their older brother, Neil, had always been fiercely protective of her, particularly during their teenage years.
‘Did you always know?’
‘Not when I was a young child. My family was my family. Danny being five months older than me...it was just a fact of our lives. Neil always knew I was only his half-sister but, again, it was just a fact of our lives and something he assumed was normal. My parents never mentioned it so he didn’t either. Then we got older and other kids started asking questions... Mum told me the truth when I was ten.’
She shuddered at the memory of that sudden realisation that her whole life had been a lie.
‘She’d been waiting until I was old enough to understand.’
It had been the most significant moment of Amy’s life. It would have been easy to feel as if her whole world had caved in, but Danny and Neil had simply shrugged it off and continued to treat her as they always had—as their sister. That, more than anything, had made it easier to cope with.
‘Did you not have any idea you weren’t hers?’
‘Not in the slightest. She loved me. Any resentment was hidden.’
‘What about your father? Where does he fit in with all this?’
‘He left it to my mum to tell me. When it came out he carried on as normal, trying to pretend nothing had changed.’
But of course everything had changed. She’d changed. How could she not? Everything she’d thought she knew about herself had been a lie.
She looked back at Helios, wanting him to understand. ‘When I was told the truth it became important, I guess, to pretend that nothing had changed. They still treated me the same. They still scolded me when I was naughty. My mum still tucked me up in bed and kissed me goodnight. Outwardly, nothing did change.’