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‘No. He asked if we could have one last night together. He picked me up in his van, and we went out for a meal in town. It was a good night.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘Well, you can imagine the rest.’
‘And then you got pregnant. I bet Nan and Grandad went mad.’
‘Your nan cried buckets. Grandad went ballistic. It took me ages to build up the courage to tell them, and I’d already started showing by the time I did, but I’d come up with a plan. If they were willing to help me look after you, I’d defer uni for a year, apply to Newcastle and stay at home.’
‘And Grandad was okay with that?’ I asked. As much as I’d loved Pop-pop and Mee-maw, I knew that Grandad had been tough and old-fashioned. I would have hated to tell him I was pregnant at eighteen.
‘Your nan won him over, eventually,’ Mum said, with a smile.
‘Did you tell Dominic you were pregnant?’
‘I did. I thought he had a right to know.’
‘What did he say?’
Mum looked away briefly in embarrassment. ‘He asked me to marry him.’
‘He proposed! I’m guessing you turned him down.’ She nodded. ‘Why?’
‘Like I said, I didn’t love him. He didn’t have any direction. He had no plan for what he wanted to do with his life. I was eighteen, still living at home and pregnant, yet I knew I wanted to have my own business. I let him down very gently. I told him I wasn’t completely shutting him out. I said he could have as much input in raising you as he wanted.’
‘So, what happened?’
‘His mother happened. The next day, she came over to the house, banging on the door, demanding to be let in. She was a frightening woman.’
‘Had you never met her before?’
‘No. Dominic always put me off meeting his parents. He said they were very set in their ways.’
‘So she came round?’
‘She called me every name under the sun. I was a slag, a slut, a bitch, a whore. I’d trapped her son by getting pregnant to force him to marry me. She was furious.’
‘Bloody hell. What happened?’
‘Your grandfather happened. He read her the riot act and practically threw her out of the house. She left but told us not to have any contact with her or Dominic ever again. I was in tears when she left.’
‘Did you ever see Dominic again?’
‘Not until about three months after you were born.’
‘Did he come to see me?’ I asked, with a smile.
‘No. I didn’t see him in person. I saw him on the news being led to the back of a police car in handcuffs.’
Chapter Three
My stomach rumbled. I was hungry. Mum offered to make me a bacon sandwich or scrambled eggs on toast, but I needed something else, something filling and bad for me. Scrolling through the many takeaway apps on my phone, I ordered a pizza. I asked Mum if she wanted anything, but she just said she’d have a slice of mine. I ordered a fourteen-inch one, just in case she wanted two slices. Screw the diet. The father I didn’t know I had had just been revealed to me and, to top it all, he was a bloody murderer. I didn’t care anymore if I ballooned up to a size forty. Though I would probably regret saying that when I was next stood in front of my floor-length mirror trying to squeeze into my only work suit.
The large pepperoni stuffed-crust pizza and a large portion of chips arrived within twenty minutes. In that time, the conversation between us was stilted. I went to the toilet and stayed in there longer than usual to marshal my thoughts, while Mum put my clothes into the dryer then went about making up the bed in my old room.
‘Why did he do it?’ I asked. I’d already devoured a slice of pizza in three bites and was halfway through the second. Mum had placed a handful of chips on a plate and was picking off pieces of pepperoni from a slice of pizza.
‘I have no idea,’ she replied. It was an honest answer. ‘To this day, I still don’t know why he killed that little girl.’
