The Chocolatier's Secret (Magnolia Creek, Book 2) (19 page)

Chapter Twenty-Six

Andrew

They say shock affects your body in many ways. The body doesn’t get enough blood flow, and it can’t function. You get dizzy, become light-headed, have difficulty breathing. All of this and more was happening to Andrew right at this moment, and he had no idea how to feel, what to say, how to react.

Molly.

His daughter.

Andrew had never been this shocked. Not when his father told him they were emigrating to Australia, not when Gemma had her first miscarriage, not even when Louis told him the web of lies they’d woven back when Julia was on the scene. And not even now when Gemma left. One minute she was standing there next to him in the chocolaterie, the next she was running out of the door, unable to cope with this girl who’d suddenly turned up in their lives.

‘I’ll go, leave you two to talk.’ Louis touched Molly’s arm, smiled warily and without another word shuffled towards the door of the chocolaterie.

Andrew had no idea what Emilio had overheard, but his employee was there now, at Louis’ side. ‘I’ll walk Louis home,’ he told Andrew. ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’ He turned the sign on the door to Closed as they left.

Only metres separated Andrew and Molly, and for a while neither of them moved, neither of them spoke.

Eventually, Andrew went to the door and locked it, pulled the chain across. And then he motioned for Molly to follow him upstairs to the café where they wouldn’t be disturbed, where customers couldn’t peer through the window to see if they were still open.

By now the rain had stopped and the sun was brave enough to appear in the sky, and they went out onto the veranda. Andrew grabbed an old towel to wipe down the chairs at a small round table, and Molly tentatively sat down. He stood, sodden towel in hand, watching her toy with the phone in her lap.

Without a word, Andrew went back inside and made two mugs of hot chocolate. He added whipped cream to the top of each, finishing the drinks with chocolate sprinkles. And when he’d run out of things to do to delay the inevitable, he joined Molly outside. He set down the mugs and sat opposite.

Andrew was the first to speak. ‘Beautiful out here, isn’t it?’

A friendly kookaburra assumed his position at the far end of the wooden railing and laughed in a way that coaxed a smile, albeit very small, out of Molly. Andrew knew, he’d only quickly glanced sideways at her, but it had been enough. They both stared out into the wide expanse, the mountain ash trees able to hide a million secrets in their density.

When he felt brave enough, he turned to Molly. ‘I didn’t know.’ He took in the eyes the same shape as his, her mouth sitting in the same relaxed manner, the cheekbones structured in the same way as Julia’s had been all those years ago when she’d sat next to him in maths class and smiled at him for the first time. ‘I didn’t know anything about you,’ he said.

Her hands shook when she tried to lift the hot chocolate. The small chocolate disc he’d put beside the cup had melted against the hot vessel and gone all gooey, and when she got it on her fingers, she put the mug down and licked the mixture off.

‘So my birth mum never told you she was pregnant?’ she asked.

‘I knew she was pregnant,’ he began, worried that anything he said could jeopardise things between them, creating an obstacle in an already unruly path. ‘But I only found out recently that Julia had gone on to have the baby,
our
baby. You.’

He was making right mess of this. He couldn’t even get his words out straight.

Molly toyed with the teaspoon beside her mug. ‘You thought she’d get an abortion?’

‘It wasn’t what I wanted at the time, but I was told that was what was going to happen.’ His anger reared its ugly head again, but he didn’t want it to. Not right now. ‘Julia left without seeing me, without telling me anything to my face.’

‘Sounds about right.’

His heart broke at the pain behind Molly’s words. Julia had told him she’d refused to see Molly, but it hadn’t meant as much to him as it did now, with Molly sitting right in front of him, the hurt written all over her face.

‘It must’ve been a shock,’ said Molly.

‘One hell of a shock,’ he clarified.

Her chair scraped back, but she didn’t go anywhere. All she’d done was put a bit of extra space between them. Perhaps they both needed it for now.

Andrew stirred his hot chocolate as the cream disappeared gradually into the hot liquid. To anyone watching, they would’ve looked like father and daughter enjoying a chat, relaxed in the bush setting with their luxury drinks. But between them and the kookaburra, they knew it wasn’t the case.

‘Why didn’t you write to me? Let me know you were coming?’ he asked.

Molly took a while to answer. ‘Because my biological mother turned me away. I wrote her letters, and I waited for months. I was
so
patient, but she still didn’t want to get to know me or tell me anything about what happened when I was born. I decided I wanted to see you for myself, without giving you warning. I didn’t want you to make excuses in your letters or emails. I wanted to see you, face-to-face, and rather than prolong the agony, I decided I’d rather have you slam a door in my face if you didn’t want to see me. At least then I’d be able to move on and I’d know.’

He couldn’t stop looking at her. ‘So you flew all the way here from England.’

She nodded, and when her eyes glistened over she looked down into her cup and stirred the remaining cream through the liquid until it’d gone.

‘You did something very brave,’ he told her.

‘It sounds crazy to everyone else, I know. But I had to do it. When Julia pushed me away, it hurt more than you could ever know.’ She stopped, gathered herself, her bottom lip wobbled, but she kept it in check. ‘I never wanted to hurt that much again, ever.’

‘Listen, Molly. Before we get into this … can I ask you one question?’ His eyes begged her to give him a chance. His mind tried to focus on the moment, not even think about Gemma, about Louis, about Julia, about anything else other than the two of them.

‘Go on,’ she said.

‘Were you happy?’

‘When?’

‘In life. Were you happy in life? Did you end up with a family who loved you? A family who wanted you?’ He brushed an ant away as it braved crawling onto the table’s surface.

‘I was, and I am, very happy.’ Her voice was soft, and when she spoke his shoulders melted with relief. ‘My family are the best people in the world.’

‘Brothers? Sisters?’

She nodded, smiling, and it was a joy for Andrew to see. Here in the moment with anger, sadness, questions, she still saw the family she’d been loved by and raised with.

‘I have a brother, Isaac. We’re very close.’

‘Was he worried when you told him what you wanted to do?’

‘Yes, very. I’m loyal to each of them, but they understand my need to find out where I came from. And just because I’m finding out more about myself doesn’t mean I’m betraying them. To a lot of people it means that, but not to us.’

‘You must have a strong bond.’

‘We do.’ Her lips pressed together conclusively. ‘And my family are behind me completely. They’ll be there to pick up the pieces if I get hurt again.’

He couldn’t begin to imagine what it must’ve been like for her. Julia hadn’t gone into detail, but he knew she’d told Molly she didn’t want to have a relationship with her, she couldn’t cope. It was Julia’s choice, but a tiny bit of him hated her for not giving their daughter a chance. None of this was Molly’s fault.

‘And you think that’s what I’m going to do?’ he asked. ‘Hurt you?’ She looked straight at him. ‘Is that what the chocolate workshop was about? You wanted to check what I was like before you got too close?’

‘No, you caught me off guard. I was watching you from a distance that day, and when you spoke to me I got so flustered and blurted out the first thing that came into my head.’

He laughed. ‘Julia used to do the same. She was confident, much more so than me, but when she got flustered she was totally different. You know, she asked me out, not the other way round?’ When Molly smiled at him he said, ‘She was talking to me outside the maths lesson, and when I turned to go on my way, she called after me, “maths homework”. She didn’t admit it for three weeks, after getting together at the local library no less than six times with our text books, but it was her way of asking me out on a date.’

‘I hate maths, too. I’d ask a boy to help rather than struggle with it myself.’ Molly relaxed enough to finish her mug of hot chocolate. ‘Thank you, that was delicious.’

‘My pleasure.’ He tapped his top lip. ‘You’ve got froth on your lip.’

Embarrassed, she wiped it off. ‘How did you suddenly find out about me?’

‘Julia messaged me on Facebook. I have a page for the chocolaterie,’ he said when she raised an eyebrow in the same quizzical way he knew he did. ‘We got talking and the truth came out. All of it.’

‘Do you mean the truth about me?’

He gulped down the rest of his hot chocolate. He didn’t use a spoon like he usually would to get the rich chocolate from the bottom of the cup. ‘We were young, neither of us thought to question anything.’ He stood up, turned on the veranda and rested his hands against the white, tired paint he’d promised they’d redo come spring. ‘At fifteen you question the world to a certain extent, but some of it you still believe in. Well, Julia and I did anyway. We never thought to question our parents.’

‘I don’t understand.’ Molly moved over to where he was.

He looked ahead, out into the forest of greens, some dark, some light, some shiny, others plain. ‘We were lied to by our parents, they split us up and Julia went off to Ireland. I came with the family to Australia.’

‘Was that what the row with Louis was about?’

Andrew nodded. ‘He said he didn’t know what else to do.’

‘You know, I’ve talked with him a few times.’

‘I’ve seen you.’ Andrew faced her and smiled, keeping a respectable distance between them.

She didn’t look at him. ‘Whatever he did back then, he’s no monster.’

Andrew noticed the way her eyelashes shaded her prominent cheekbones. He didn’t want to talk about Louis, not now. ‘You look a lot like Julia, you know.’

‘Do I?’ She looked up at him.

He nodded, looked away briefly, uncomfortable in their sudden familiarity. He had a sudden flash of memory of the warmth in Julia’s eyes, the way he’d sunken into them when she looked at him.

‘I saw her so briefly when I turned up on her doorstep,’ said Molly. ‘I didn’t have a chance to think about whether I looked like her. She couldn’t wait to get away from me.’

‘It would’ve been a shock. I know she’s still hurting.’ He wasn’t going to make excuses for Julia and he was upset with her, but he didn’t hate her. She would’ve been in an impossible situation back then, and he didn’t see the woman who’d told Molly to go away. He saw the terrified fifteen-year-old, pregnant and abandoned – or so she thought – by her boyfriend.

‘It’s different for a birth mother,’ said Andrew. ‘She carried a child inside her for nine months, and I can’t imagine the pain when it came to such an abrupt end and she gave her baby away.’

Molly mellowed. ‘It must’ve been very hard.’

‘In a way it’s better I didn’t know until now,’ he told her. ‘I’m not sure I could’ve coped knowing you’d gone to another family, knowing we were going about our lives as though none of it had happened.’ He paused. ‘You must have a lot of questions.’

Molly’s phone chimed, but she ignored it. ‘It’s probably Ben.’

‘Ben Harrison? I’ve seen you with him. How do you two know each other?’

Molly grinned. ‘I had a slight – okay, massive – fear of flying. Anyway, my brother is getting married in America in a few months and he wants me to be there, so a year ago I joined an online support group for those with the same fear.’

He shook his head. ‘There’s so much we don’t know about each other.’

‘This was the first flight I’ve ever taken,’ said Molly.

Part of him beamed with pride that she’d got over this huge obstacle in her way to get what she wanted, what she thought she might need. Molly told him all about her time with the online group, how she’d warmed to Ben straight away and how he’d flown part of the way with her. He’d laughed as she told him about the nail marks she’d left in Ben’s hand after the first take-off.

‘And neither of you had any idea you were about to bump into each other in Magnolia Creek?’

Molly shook her head. ‘Ben and I were both protective of our identities and careful not to share specifics. You never know online, do you? And I never probed once we met because I was focused on the reason for me coming to Australia in the first place.

‘You say I must have lots of questions, but I don’t really. I thought I’d have a million things to ask you, but I feel a bit numb. Does that make sense?’

‘Perfect sense. I felt the same way for days when I found out about you. I couldn’t even think straight. After I’d read Julia’s message and found out about your existence, I swished my mouth with some clarifying lotion of Gemma’s instead of the mouthwash.’ Molly laughed and the tension abated. ‘It tasted revolting!’