Her eyes were flashing, and I realised she was furious. Jamie pulled her closer, and she buried her face in his neck while she trembled.
“Sshhh, it’s over now, they’re safe, it’s over babe.” He whispered, but Nia pulled away to glare at him.
“No it’s not, not for Mark! It’ll never be over for him, not after what she did to him! Mummy told me …!” she caught herself and buried her face in his neck once more.
I realised I was holding Lena’s hand, both of us needing human contact in the midst of the emotional turmoil in the room.
Emma was twisting and coiling her handkerchief, obviously wanting to ask Nia something. Jamie noticed, and nudged Nia, who quickly wiped her eyes and composed herself.
“Do you have a picture of … of Julie, or Mark? They were so small the last time I saw them, so young, I would so like to see what they look like now…”
Nia nodded and opened her purse, pulling out a digital camera and a photo wallet. She took out a photograph and passed it to Emma
“This is our school picture, when we were eleven, that’s Julie, standing next to me.”
I peered at the picture, seeing a small girl with long, platinum-blonde hair. She looked so much like how I imagined Mo-Mo was going to look, and even Lena saw it.
“This is a baby picture Mark managed to find.”
Lena looked at it and gasped. Nia looked puzzled at her reaction, so Lena stood up and picked Mo-Mo’s picture off the mantelpiece. When Nia saw both pictures side by side she gasped too; they could have been sisters, the same white-blonde hair, the same green eyes, the same expression as they giggled for the camera. Sure, to me, Mo-Mo looked like Lena, but the resemblance to Julie was also apparent now that I could see them both side by side.
“This is my Maureen, Mo-Mo to family and friends, her grandfather is Emma’s brother, Darryl’s biological father. That should prove they’re family.”
Nia studied the two photographs raptly.
“I’ll say!” she breathed, “It’s uncanny, look at them! Look at this, though.”
She snapped-on the camera and flicked through the pictures until she came to the one she wanted.
“This is Mark…”
The man in the picture could almost have been the younger me, but with grey eyes; everything else was me; same hair, same expression. I stared at my double, while Lena flicked back and forth between the two of us, also unable to believe what she was seeing.
“He looks just like you, like Robert…” she breathed, and I nodded, as did Emma, smiling even as she gazed with tears in her eyes at the man she’d last seen as a small boy.
“I don’t see his father at all, nothing,” she marvelled, “only Robbie, and Darryl, and my dad. He has his father’s eyes though. Are they happy now? That’s all I ever wanted to know. I don’t mind if I never meet them, just so long as I know they’re both happy.”
Nia nodded.
“They’re happy; poor Mark’s still trapped inside whatever it was his mother did to him, but Julie’s helping him out of that. Their mother’s dead now, she can’t hurt him anymore, and they’re both free of her. Julie’s happy, I promise you.”
I had one question I still needed an answer to.
“My friends at St. Georges unearthed a request from Croydon University Hospital Ante-Natal clinic for Julie’s records; does she have a baby?”
Nia and Jamie exchanged glances, then nodded.
“She has two, Nia… and Markie. Markie’s two and a bit, the same age as mine, and Nia’s just over a year old now…”
“Is she married now?” asked Lena, and Nia shook her head.
“No, but she and Ma… her partner are happy, and very much in love.”
Lena looked at me; she’d caught the correction as well; Nia had almost said ‘Mark’; something else was going on here. Jamie jumped in while Nia covered her confusion.
“Darryl, you say Julie’s uncle Robert is your father, and he was a Fraser; if I’m not prying too deeply, why is your name ‘Morgan’?”
I spent the next couple of minutes explaining to him the circumstances of my birth and upbringing, and why I carried my maternal grandfather’s name, not my father’s.
“That’s quite a story,” he commented, “he died in the Falklands? I was there my last year of uni, working with a geophysical team, prospecting for oil. It’s odd how our two families keep intersecting and going off again. Mark kept getting mistaken for you, and it freaked him out!”
My ears pricked up, and my interest must have shown, so he elaborated.
“Mark’s brokerage firm has an office in Clifton, well, Redland, actually, and he comes down once a month; he’d go for lunch in one of the pubs behind the Royal Infirmary, and someone would come up to him and call him ‘Darryl’; poor guy was getting freaked about it. I guess people were mistaking him for you, so do you work in Clifton?”
Lena grinned.
“Dar works at the Bristol Royal Infirmary; it was probably only going to be a matter of time before he and Mark walked smack into each other in a pub around there!”
Both Jamie and Nia looked interested, so I elaborated.
“I’m the Junior Surgical Consultant on the Cardiology team. I trained at St. Georges, and lived in a flat on one of the streets off Tooting Broadway. I used to go for a drink on my evenings off at ‘The Windmill’ on Clapham Common, because the pubs at Amen Corner and Tooting Broadway were just too rough, and I usually parked my car on the street where you live; again we go back to what you were saying just now, about our lives constantly intersecting then going off again at tangents; I may even have seen Julie a dozen times when I was a med student and never knew who she was; she would have just been a little girl then, so I probably wouldn’t even have noticed her.”
While I’d been talking, Lena and Nia kept exchanging glances; there was some kind of communication going on there, and when I cocked an eyebrow at her, she nodded, that expression she get’s when she knows she’s right settling on her. She leaned forward, her hand finding mine again as she spoke.