Still squeezing him, Kate said, ‘How many times have I told you not to go off with strangers?’
Jack wriggled. ‘Ania’s not a stranger. She’s my friend. Can I get down?’
Kate put him down and turned back to the babysitter, who put her palms up.
‘Hey, I’m sorry – he would not settle so I tell him we can go in the lift as special treat, if he go to sleep straight after. We had a deal.’
Kate narrowed her eyes. ‘Get out of my sight.’
‘I would never have taken him out of the hotel. This is not fair. I did not expect you back so soon. But if that’s the way you feel, I am sorry.’ Ania shrugged and stalked off towards the desk and the gawping receptionists.
Kate knew that in a while she’d feel hot with embarrassment. She would regret shouting at the babysitter, though she thought it was totally out of order to leave the hotel room with Jack for anything less than a fire alarm (she still shuddered at the mere thought of a fire alarm).
She’d feel pretty bad about dragging the woman with the fur coat out of the lift, too, and for knocking over that businessman. If she’d come out of the room two minutes later, Jack would probably have been in the lift already, instead of the fur-clad woman, and all this embarrassment could have been avoided. She’d have to apologise. Right now, though, she just felt relief. Her greatest fear hadn’t come true. Not yet anyway.
She crouched down and stroked Jack’s hair, thinking, from now on, I’m not going to let you out of my sight.
‘So you had fun?’ she said, forcing a smile.
‘Yeah, it was awesome.’ Spotting something behind her, he said, ‘Hey Mum, look. It’s that man.’
‘What?’
‘That man we met today.’
Kate turned her head and found Paul looking back at her from his position by the door.
Paul had walked into the hotel just as Kate emerged from the lift and collided with the unfortunate businessman. He watched with astonishment as Kate bowled past this guy, sprinted over to the reception desk and started gesticulating. He couldn’t hear what she was saying, and could only see the back of her head. What the hell was wrong with her?
Seeing her knock people over and shout abuse at the hotel staff, he wondered whether she deserved the apology he’d planned to give her.
He almost walked straight out again.
But as he turned to go, he saw the kid, Jack, coming through the doors of the same elevator, just minutes later, with some other woman, and then Kate had turned around and the look on her face – the sheer relief – told him the whole story of what was going on here. She wasn’t crazy. She was a mother. Paul didn’t have kids of his own, but he remembered times when he was small and he’d wandered off, obliviously walking around the supermarket or garden centre while his parents searched for him frantically. He remembered their joy and anger when they found him – or sometimes him and Stephen, the two of them having disappeared together.
So instead of leaving, he hung around, waiting for Kate to notice him. He still wasn’t sure about her. He didn’t know anything about her. And although he understood how panicked she must have felt when she came back to the hotel and found her son missing, he still thought she’d over-reacted a little.
Later, when he found out the whole truth, he would understand exactly why Kate had behaved as she did.
‘Do you want to grab a coffee?’ Paul nodded towards the hotel’s lounge area.
Kate hesitated. ‘I don’t know. It’s way past Jack’s bedtime.’
But Jack was far too hyped up to want to go to bed now. Ania’s strategy sucked, thought Kate. She herself wasn’t tired anymore either. Her body was still flushed with adrenaline. Add that to the fact that they had only been in the UK for a few days and their body clocks were out of kilter, so it wasn’t surprising that they felt wide awake.
‘I really want to talk to you about what you said earlier,’ Paul said.
Jack piped up: ‘Mum, I want a hot chocolate.’
She sighed. ‘Okay. But then it really is bedtime, no more messing around.’
‘Do you like hot chocolate?’ Jack asked Paul intently, as if something mightily important depended on the answer.
‘It’s one of my favourite things in the world – particularly when it comes with squirty cream, and those little marshmallows on top,’ replied Paul, and Jack nodded his approval.
‘Can I have marshmallows and squirty cream on mine tonight?’ he asked Kate, who rolled her eyes but nodded.
Jack and Paul smiled at each other, and something about this little exchange squeezed Kate’s heart. This was scarily close to an old fantasy of hers: of Stephen being the father of her child. Like the family she’d so often dreamt about. But then she shook the fantasy away. It was ridiculous. Reality check, Kate. Stephen’s dead. Paul is his brother but he’s a stranger. And Jack’s father is an arsehole called Vernon.
She needed a coffee badly.
They sat on soft, cracked-leather sofas, Kate and Jack on one side, Paul on the other. Kate sipped her coffee. Paul was agitated, clearly wrestling with a series of questions, unsure of what to ask first. Kate could see that she and Paul were both alike in a lot of ways – used to dealing with computers, data, facts. The scientist and the computer geek – or rather, expert; Paul was too cool to be a classic computer geek, not to mention too good-looking. Put them in the lab or in front of a PC and they were like dolphins in water. Ask them to deal with awkward questions and they floundered and flapped.
She looked at Jack, who was trying to appear grown up as he blew on his hot chocolate.
‘Nice?’ Paul asked him, and he shrugged.
‘No marshmallows,’ he said gloomily, but he hadn’t kicked up a fuss about it, as Kate had feared he might.
She was a good mother. She was sure of that, despite what Vernon said and what Ania the babysitter, and probably all the hotel staff, thought. They probably thought she was an over-protective psycho.
All of a sudden Jack started to waver, and swayed on the sofa. Kate had to take his mug from him, and moments later he closed his eyes and leaned back, falling asleep.
‘He’s a sweet kid,’ Paul said.
‘I know. He’s especially lovely when he’s like this.’
‘You don’t mean that.’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘You clearly don’t have any children.’
‘No. No nephews or nieces either.’
Kate stroked her sleeping son’s hair. It was so soft, his scalp warm beneath her palm. She shuddered, remembering how terrified she’d been at the thought of losing him. She took a big gulp of coffee.
‘Will you tell me about you and Stephen now?’ asked Paul. ‘Tell me what you remember. Like, how did you meet him? Can you remember that?’
Kate stared into her cup. ‘I do. I remember meeting him, and I remember losing him. It’s a lot of the stuff in between that’s lost.’
‘I’m sorry if I seemed irritable earlier, but I have to admit I don’t get it. It doesn’t sound possible that you could forget so much.’
‘But it is!’
‘Sorry . . .’
‘No, it’s okay. I know it makes me sound stupid. How could I have forgotten the most important summer of my life? It’s amnesia, but I don’t know what caused it.’