Page 180 of Pull Me Under

Jude swallows hard. ‘That’s … that’s your grandmother, Mais.’

Maisie’s eyes go wide. ‘I have another grandmother?’

‘Yeah.’ His voice cracks. ‘You do.’

Maisie looks at Helen – still wrapped around Kit, still crying – and then back at Jude. Processing.

‘She seems sad,’ Maisie says.

‘She’s not sad. She’s—’ Jude stops. Tries again. ‘Sometimes when people are really, really happy, it looks like sad. Because there’s too much feeling to hold inside.’

Maisie considers this with the gravity of an eight-and-a-half-year-old philosopher.

‘That’s weird,’ she decides. ‘But okay.’

Helen finally releases Kit. Turns towards Jude.

The space between them feels vast. Twenty years of silence. Twenty years of believing she’d abandoned him. Twenty years of Jude being the one who stayed, the spare son, the good soldier – all of it built on a lie.

‘Jude.’ Helen’s voice is barely a whisper.

He doesn’t move.

‘I know you’re angry,’ she says. ‘You have every right to be. I left you. I let him tell you I didn’t care. I⁠—’

‘You were pregnant.’

The words cut through everything.

Helen goes still.

‘When you left,’ Jude continues. His voice is flat. Controlled. ‘You were carrying Lily. And you never told us.’

‘I couldn’t. Reuben would have⁠—’

‘We had a sister. For nineteen years, we had a sister, and we didn’t know.’

‘I know.’ Helen’s crying again. ‘I know. I wanted to tell you. I wrote so many letters trying to explain – but the ones I sent to Gareth’s cottage went to an empty house because they’d already moved, and the ones I sent to your father’s address⁠—’

‘He burned them,’ Jude says. ‘Every one.’

‘I only found out years later. By then I’d stopped writing. I thought the silence meant none of you wanted to hear from me.’

‘We didn’t know there was anything to hear.’

The brutality of it. Twenty years of parallel grief. Helen writing into a void. Gareth writing into a void. The boys growing up believing they’d been abandoned. And Reuben at the centre of it all, burning bridges he’d convinced everyone else had chosen to cross.

‘You could have tried harder.’

The words hang in the air. Brutal. True.

Helen flinches like she’s been struck.

Kit steps forward. ‘Jude⁠—’

‘No.’ Jude holds up a hand. ‘I’m not – I’m not saying this to hurt you. I’m saying it because I need you to understand what it was like.’ He turns slightly, and for the first time his eyes find Kit’s. ‘Kit and I grew up thinking our mother didn’t want us. And I – I was the one who stayed. Even when I wanted to leave. Even when every part of me was screaming to go.’

Kit’s face changes. Something shifts behind his eyes – recognition, or the beginning of it.