Page 69 of The Perfect Guests
“Well, that’s when we decided to invite you here. It was only meant to be for a week or so. Enough time to trick Hendrik into believing you were Nina, and then you’d go back.” Briefly, she meets my gaze, and her expression grows earnest. “But we liked having you here, Beth.Ninaliked you. And Markus always wanted her to have a brother or sister—he was the one who suggested you stay until Caroline was ready for you...”
“And Caroline never was ready for me,” I say faintly.
“No.” She turns back to the window. “No, Caroline turned out to have been playing a game of her own.”
I stare at her, and it takes me a moment to respond. “What do you mean?”
But she’s lost in her thoughts now. As the silence stretches, my hope stretches with it, like a strand of toffee about to snap. Then, when she finally begins to talk again, her words come quickly, referring to me in the third person, as if she’s forgotten I’m right here next to her. I wonder if the shock of last night has finally caught up with her—and then I forget everything else as I’m drawn into her story.
“Markus said he’d never noticed anything odd about Beth until he got back from his diving trip. But then he saw something, when he was getting his suitcases out of the car.‘She looked just like my mother,’he said. Not that he told me at the time.” She frowns. “No, he kept it quiet. Until Caroline came for her Christmas visit.”
I think back to that last visit of Caroline’s—the stilted conversation in the drawing room; Markus suggesting we walk around the lake but leave Leonora at home; Markus suggesting that Nina and Itake the rowing boat out for what might be the last time before the lake froze over. Markus and Caroline strolling away along the lake path, then, just the two of them...
“I watched from the window,” Leonora says. “They went all the way around, past the tree stump, out of sight. And when they came back, Caroline looked angry. She left immediately, but—” Her voice turns bitter. “Markus was in a great mood. He wanted to tell the girls the news straightaway, he said, but luckily, I made him tell me first, and then I begged him to wait...”
I lean closer. “Tell the girls what news?”
She doesn’t seem to hear me. “And then he wanted to buy them matching bracelets...”
“What news, Leonora? What was it?”
“Caroline wasn’t hisclient.” She spits out the word. “She was his ex-girlfriend. I’d seen her years earlier, from a distance, but she wasn’t a hard-faced journalist back then. She was all long hair and denim shorts and orange crop top... She used to call herself Kat.”
Something stirs in my memory, like sludge shifting at the bottom of the lake. My brother, Ricky, calling our rarely seen aunt Caroline “Aunty Kat.” As if he’d once had a closer relationship with her, before I came on the scene.
Leonora’s voice drops. “He said he made Caroline tell him the truth, on that walk around the lake. That after they broke up, she found out she was pregnant. She was going to get rid of the baby. But her sister persuaded her...”
“No,” I whisper.
“Because her sister’s son had cystic fibrosis, and she was desperate for another child, but she was scared of it having the same condition... So the sister took on Kat’s baby.”
I shake my head. “No!”
“Markus said it made Nina and Beth practically sisters.” She screws up her face in anger. “But that wasn’t true! And everything I’d ever planned—”
I stumble to my feet, and Leonora’s attention snaps back to the present. She looks horrified for a moment, and then she glares at me accusingly.
“Get out!” She, too, springs to her feet, her voice rising to a shriek. “What are you doing in here? Get out of my house!”
I run from her. But I can’t run from the truth.
I’m Markus and Caroline’s daughter.
Sadie
Sadie stumbles backward into the hall as Beth flees the dining room.
Beth is white-faced, horrified. She repeats the same words over and over: “I’m not... I’m not... I’m not...” When Sadie tries to go to her, to comfort her, Beth bats her away as if she doesn’t recognize her.
Sadie’s still struggling to make sense of Leonora’s words herself. She barely knows her great-aunt Caroline...My grandmother Caroline,she thinks with a jolt. But one thing’s for sure: Beth has never coped well with even trivial emotional subjects. How can she possibly cope with a revelation of this magnitude?
“Beth, look at me.” Somehow, Joe’s voice cuts through Beth’s panic. “You’re going to be okay,” Joe tells her. “Everything’s going to be fine. I promise.”
Beth’s breathing gradually slows. “I’m not... I’m not who I thought I was...”
“You’re still my mum, though,” Sadie says, and this time shemanages to catch hold of Beth’s hands. “It doesn’t changeus,does it?”
Beth stares back at her. “I wish I hadn’t asked... Everything I ever thought... I wish I didn’t know...”
