Log Fires & Toffee Apple Cake at the Little Duck Pond Cafe - Rosie Green Page 0,2

and then something slithered down the back of my T-shirt. Honestly, I screamed so loudly, you could have heard me a mile away. I curled up in a ball and refused to look up for the rest of the ride.’

‘Spooky,’ murmurs Ellie.

‘You haven’t heard the scariest bit. When I felt down the back of my T-shirt, guess what I found? An ivy leaf.’

There’s a shocked silence.

‘Ivy Moxon,’ murmurs Primrose with a grimace.

Ellie laughs. ‘It was probably just the fairground guy playing a trick on you.’

I shake my head. ‘No. He was nowhere near us.’

‘Don’t tell Fen that story,’ warns Katja, scooping her heavy dark hair away from her face, into a ponytail. ‘Otherwise we’ll never get her on the ghost train.’

‘Fen’s late,’ murmurs Ellie, glancing at her watch. ‘She’s doing her food bank deliveries but she said she’d be back by now.’

‘Oh, I want to go on the ghost train more than ever now,’ sighs Jaz. ‘But I guess by then I’ll be otherwise engaged with this one.’ She pats her tummy affectionately.

‘It’ll all be so worth it, though,’ points out Primrose. ‘When you’ve got that beautiful baby you’ve wanted for so long.’

Jaz smiles. ‘It will.’

‘And Harry will be a brilliant dad,’ says Katja, and we all murmur our agreement.

I stare out over the pond to the trees beyond, the mention of dads plunging me into the state of inner turmoil that is almost a permanent fixture these days – ever since I made the shocking discovery no-one should ever make when searching for a spare phone charger in their mum’s bedside drawer…

‘You okay, Maddy?’ asks Ellie. ‘That was a very expressive sigh.’

I turn, pasting on a smile. ‘Fine. I was…just thinking about what makes a good dad. And Harry will definitely be the fun kind of dad. The sort who throws his kid in the air to make them squeal and gets them all hyped up just before bedtime by pretending to be a lion and chasing them around the house.’

Jaz laughs. ‘That’s very specific. Did your dad do that with you?’

‘No, but we used to be inseparable. I was a proper daddy’s girl when I was little.’ I swallow, as a kaleidoscope of memories from childhood whirl through my head. ‘Dad would take me fishing with him sometimes and we’d sit on the riverbank for hours with our peanut butter sandwiches and jam doughnuts, and chat about everything and nothing.’ I smile, remembering. ‘We never caught much when I was there because I was a bit of a chatterbox, but Dad didn’t mind.’ A little sigh escapes. ‘Those were the days.’

‘You’re not so close now?’ asks Jaz.

I shake my head. ‘Adolescence, you see, turned me into a monster.’ I shrug, trying to laugh it off. ‘And growing up with a pair of perfectly behaved twin sisters threw my teenage rebellion into pretty sharp relief. I’m not surprised Dad went off me.’

Katja flashes me a look of sympathy, which is frankly the last thing I need, feeling as emotional as I do on the subject. After stumbling upon my birth certificate in Mum’s drawer and seeing just a blank space under ‘father’s name’, once the shock subsided, it occurred to me that Mum must have been lying when she claimed to have mislaid my birth certificate a long time ago. She just didn’t want me to see it and guess the truth.

But what is the truth?

Why is Dad’s name missing?

I’ve tried a few times to broach the subject with Mum, but on each occasion, I’ve bottled it.

My relationship with Dad has been rocky ever since I turned fourteen and started behaving badly. My dad was far harder on me than he was on Chloe and Jasmine growing up. The easy bond he and I shared when I was younger seemed to vanish overnight, although obviously I pretended I didn’t care.

I always seemed to be the one getting into trouble, even when I felt I hadn’t done anything terribly wrong. The twins could chase each other round the house and knock over a vase, and Dad would laugh and say he’d never liked that vase anyway. But I remember once, I left a tray on a hob that was still turned on (but so low that it was hard to tell) and Dad absolutely hit the roof. He’s normally quite reserved and rarely raises his voice, so it scared me a little when he shouted because I knew he must be really angry. You’d think I’d burned the entire house