‘You didn’t have to. I was out of line.’
‘No, I didn’t have to. But that’s not the reason I didn’t answer.’
‘What are you saying?’
She looked at him for a second. ‘Wait,’ she said, before moving across the room to where her handbag lay on the benchtop. She pulled out her purse and flipped it open, tugging something out from one of the pockets.
‘Look,’ she said, holding it out towards him.
‘Jade, I…’
‘Take it.’
He took it and looked down. It was an old, battered photograph, worn at the edges. A photograph of a young girl, her face cast down, her eyes hiding from the camera. But there was a red mark on the photo, covering half her face, so the picture wasn’t clear—he couldn’t make out who it was.
And then he gave a hiss as it hit him.
The mark wasn’t on the photograph.
The mark was on her skin.
‘Who is this?’ he asked. ‘Why did you give this to me?’
‘Don’t you recognise her?’ she asked. ‘She’s a girl people wrote off—because of the way she looked. Because of a birthmark that covered half her face people turned their heads away when she came down the street. People couldn’t bear to look her in the eye, and when they did it was always with horror. Or, worse still, pity. Those people judged her because of the way she looked. She was worthless in their eyes.
‘And you’re no different to the people who shunned her because she didn’t fit into their neat little view of the world. Because she’s someone you summed up in a second simply because of the way she looked.’
He frowned down at the photograph. Her words burned in his psyche. It couldn’t be possible—what was she trying to say? Nothing made sense. But there was something in the angle of the chin of the girl in the photograph, the slope of her cheek, something achingly familiar.
He looked from the photo to Jade and back again. ‘Surely…?’
She laughed, and he knew she was laughing at him—and at his battle to come to terms with what was staring him in the face.
‘It is me, Loukas. That’s the real me as I had to live for sixteen years of my life. And that’s the real me you apparently would rather see. That’s the real me you would have preferred in your bed—someone unsullied by the evil hand of cosmetic surgery.’
He brushed aside her barbed comment—there was more at stake here than his own preconceived notions. ‘What happened to you to give you this?’
She shrugged. ‘Nothing “happened”. I was simply born like that.’
‘And there was nothing they could do then?’
‘You have to understand it was a small country hospital and my mother was their main concern. She started haemorrhaging shortly after I was born. They tried to save her but just weren’t equipped. By the time they transferred her to Sydney it was too late. They lost her en route. And my father was left without a wife and with a baby he couldn’t bear to look at. He’d lost his childhood sweetheart and was lumbered with the ugliest creature he’d ever seen—something that could never replace the woman he’d lost, or ever stop reminding him of the pain.’
She paused for a couple of moments before continuing.
‘And so for a while he refused to take me—and it looked like I would have to be adopted. But somehow someone managed to convince him to keep me, maybe because they couldn’t find anyone else—God, it must have just about killed him.’
She stopped again then, as if thinking back. ‘I think he really must have loved me to do that,’ she said.
‘What about when you were older?’ he asked. ‘They must have tried something in all that time.’
‘Oh, yeah, they sure did.’ Now her voice was more strident, almost bitter. ‘Laser surgery was only new—experimental, really—and my doctors asked my father if I’d be game to give the new technology a try. I was only twelve years old, but I begged my father to let me do it. Because even if the people of the town had grown used to seeing me the way I was, had become accustomed to averting their eyes or masking their pity, still none of their sons asked me to school dances. Nobody wanted to be seen with me. And so I begged him to give me the chance to be as beautiful as my mother had been.’