Page 142 of Pull Me Under

My dad and Jude’s mum. An affair. It has to be – nothing else makes sense. The intensity of Reuben’s hatred. The way the whole village went quiet when I asked what happened. Bill’s sad eyes: some wounds run deep.

But even as I think it, my mind rebels.

Does that make us – what? Some kind of incestuous nightmare? My dad shagged his mum, so now we’re … step-siblings by infidelity? Gross. I can’t even deal with the thought of that.

I laugh, but it comes out wrong. High-pitched. Slightly unhinged.

Get a grip, Trelawney.

We’re not related. Not by blood. Our parents having an affair doesn’t make us family – it just makes us the inheritors of someone else’s mess.

Although that’s hardly a comfort, is it?

I set down my tea and start pulling papers from the box. Methodical this time. No more skimming, no more putting things aside for later. I need to find proof. Need to know if the horror story I’ve constructed in my head is real or just paranoid speculation born of too little sleep and too many secrets.

Bank statements. Old photographs. A birthday card from my grandmother, dead before I was old enough to remember her. A rent agreement for a flat in Bristol, dated 1998.

And letters. So many letters.

Most of them are from Grandad to Dad – short, practical missives about money and logistics.

Sending £200 for school fees. Hope you’re keeping well. W.

No emotion. No warmth. Just duty.

But underneath those, bundled separately, are the ones I’ve been avoiding. The ones in my father’s handwriting. His journals, his notes, his rambling confessions to no one.

I spread them across my lap and start to read.

It takes an hour.

An hour of my father’s cramped script, his half-finished thoughts, his guilt that soaks through every page. He writes about her constantly – never by name, just ‘she’ and ‘her’ and sometimes, when he’s being poetic, ‘my love’ or ‘my heart’.

It’s pathetic, really. This grown man, mooning over a woman like a lovesick teenager.

Except.

Except he was in agony. Real, consuming agony. The kind that doesn’t fade with time – it just calcifies, becomes part of you, a stone in your heart that you carry until it drags you under.

I dream of her still, he writes in one entry dated 2015. Twenty years and I still wake reaching for her side of the bed. What kind of man does that make me? What kind of father?

A bad one, I think. A bad one who loved someone more than he loved his own child.

And the anger rises, hot and sudden.

She was more important. Whoever she was. Whatever she did. His love for me couldn’t touch what he felt for her.

I set the letters down, breathing hard.

H.

The initial sits in my mind like a stone dropping into still water. All those unsent letters, all that grief – and they’re all for someone called H. Someone he loved more than he could say, more than he could send.

And then it surfaces. Clear as the day I arrived. The post piled behind the door – council tax reminders, a water bill, lots and lots of bad-news brown envelopes. I’d swept the whole lot into a black bin bag and shoved it in a kitchen cupboard, because I had too much else to deal with and unopened post felt like a problem for a future version of me. But there’d been one that snagged my attention for a second. Not a bill. Different paper. A looping feminine hand, a beacon amongst formal type.

I hadn’t opened it. Hadn’t thought about it since.

I’m on my feet before I’ve made a decision.