Authors: Annabel Kantaria
Coming Home (38 page)
I read the letter several times, shaking my head until I understood; shaking my head until I worked out how events
must have unfolded; what my mother must have done. My father had never spoken to the consultant. Mum had said she’d answered the phone. It was she who’d told Dad he had an urgent appointment with the consultant; it was she who’d checked his file and told him the devastating results.
I remembered the look of hatred that had flicked across her face when she’d mentioned Zoe’s new pregnancy and I shivered, pulling the thin aeroplane blanket further up my lap. I imagined Mum reaching for Dad’s hand as she told him about the fictitious phone call from the hospital. Perhaps she’d even been the one to offer to check his file. Perhaps she’d been thinking of Tom, or maybe of Zoe’s new baby, while she’d sympathised with Dad; agreed that his only option was suicide; kindly agreed to help.
I took a large swig of my gin and tonic and swilled it around my mouth. I thought about the secrets that my mother had lived with; about how she must have felt, and about the look that she would have had in her eye as she’d suffocated my father. I thought about my uncle’s glass eye and about the grandfather I’d never known.
In my hands, I held evidence that could see my mother jailed for murder. But what was she? A cold-blooded killer—or a woman pushed to her limits?
With clammy hands, I put the letter back in its envelope, folded it in half and zipped it carefully into the inner section of my handbag. Then I leaned back in my seat and stared out of the window at the darkness beyond.
ISBN: 978-1-474-02496-9
COMING HOME
© 2015 Annabel Kantaria
Published in Great Britain 2015
by Harlequin MIRA, an imprint of Harlequin (UK) Limited,
Eton House, 18-24 Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey TW9 1SR
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