The Chocolatier's Secret (Magnolia Creek, Book 2) Read online

  ‘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!’

  ‘I’m sure it did.’

  Andrew snapped back to reality, having been lost in the easy repartee. ‘It’s not just me trying to get my head around this,’ he explained.

  Molly nodded. ‘I know you have your own family to consider.’

  He scraped a hand across his jaw.

  ‘If this all blows up in my face, then I’ll deal with it,’ said Molly. ‘But I had to take the chance and I’m sorry if this makes things difficult at home for you.’

  ‘Can you do something for me, Molly?’

  Her eyes searched his beneath the darkening sky as the sun began its retreat behind another cloud. ‘Of course.’ She gulped.

  ‘Promise me you won’t apologise again for coming into my life,’ he said in earnest. ‘I’ll never be sorry you’ve turned up the way you have.’ He didn’t realise until he said it quite how much he’d longed to have contact with his daughter. Ever since the day he knew of her existence in the world, his life was destined never to be the same again.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Andrew
/>   As they felt a few spots of rain, they retreated inside and sat next to one another on the worn yellow sofa – another item due to be replaced as the business grew. They talked about Molly’s childhood. She had a few pictures on her phone of her mum, her dad, her brother … the family she had now, including photos she’d added especially for this moment to fill in some of the gaps for him. Andrew warmed to the thought of her being so close to her family, but each time he looked at photographs of the past – her first bicycle with tassels hanging from the handlebars, her sixteenth birthday and the cake her mum had made, her graduation ceremony with Molly in a mortar board, sandwiched between two proud parents – he saddened a little bit more. These were moments he’d been cheated out of by their lying parents, moments he could never get back for himself.

  Oh, the unfairness of it all. It made him wonder how many other birth fathers were out there and had been forgotten about, kept in the dark, lied to.

  He loved hearing about Molly’s career so far, her tales of her job as a midwife. She spoke with passion; she had the same sparkle in her eye and persistent smile on her face that he had when he spoke about the chocolate business. In turn, he told her all about how he’d come to own the chocolaterie, their move from the city to the country.

  ‘Do you have any children?’ Molly asked then. ‘Or, any other children?’ she corrected herself.

  ‘It’s hard to know what to say, isn’t it? Do I say “daughter” when I talk about you, do I call myself your “father”? I don’t really know what my position is.’

  Molly didn’t say anything.

  ‘No, no other children.’

  ‘Can I ask why?’

  He noticed he still had his apron on, spattered in chocolate from his day’s work. ‘It hasn’t happened for Gemma and I. I’m not sure it ever will.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said quietly. And then, after a while, ‘I must have been a big shock to Gemma.’

  Truthfully, he felt stuck between these two women and he had no idea what the solution was. Gemma had a lot of weight on her shoulders and Molly turning up out of the blue must’ve been the final blow. She’d never run off, avoided a confrontation. Gemma was strong, she tackled things head on.

  ‘A shock,’ he said, ‘but I hope eventually she’ll accept it. We’ve never kept secrets from each other, especially not secrets of this magnitude.

  ‘But don’t you worry about us, Molly.’ As he reassured her he chuckled to himself. He sounded so … father like! ‘We’ll get through this, I’m sure we will. It might take Gemma a while to come round, that’s all.’

  ‘I hope so. Gemma seems lovely.’

  ‘She’s very special.’ He nodded. ‘Why are you smiling?’

  Molly looked around the top floor of the café. ‘This … everything … you. It’s all so normal.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ he grinned.

  ‘When you search for your biological family, you’re warned you might uncover things you’d rather not know. You worry you’ll find them so far from the ideal you’d imagined, that you wish it’d stayed in your head, a figment of your imagination.’

  ‘And what did you dream we’d be, before you searched for me and Julia?’

  ‘It’s so silly now.’

  ‘Try me.’ When Molly looked up he was still taken aback by how much she resembled Julia. How had he missed it when they first met? Or maybe she only looked like Julia because he was looking at her in that way, taking in her flawless young skin, the dark hair curling at the ends like Julia’s had.

  ‘Okay,’ Molly continued. ‘I’ll admit I definitely had an ideal when I met Julia. I had this image of her in my mind. And apart from any physical similarities, she’d take one look at me and be unable to stop. She’d open her arms the minute I landed on her doorstep, pull me inside and tell me how she’d done nothing but think of me over the years and how her life had been nothing until I knocked on the door.

  ‘See, told you it sounded silly.’

  ‘It doesn’t at all. But Julia was always pretty determined, even back then when we were fifteen. The problem is, we don’t know what has gone on since.’ He let his comment settle.

  Molly smiled. ‘When I was really little, I had this crazy notion my birth parents would still be together, madly in love, waiting for me to get in touch. They would, of course, be ready to shower me with gifts – a magnificent bedroom, a pony, as many sweets as I wanted.’

  They both smiled at her dreams.

  ‘I was a happy child and I never once wanted for anything, but eventually curiosity got the better of me. Over the years, before I traced her, I’d built Julia up to be this angelic woman, this person who was missing a piece without me, but when she pushed me away I didn’t think about you. And I don’t mean it spitefully.’

  Molly explained about the man who’d been refused access to his newborn at the hospital. ‘You don’t do a job like midwifery without it affecting you emotionally. It’s impossible, and anyone who says they can completely detach themselves is lying. I felt for the man, really felt for him, and it got me thinking about you. It made me realise there was another part to the story, another piece missing.

  ‘If, in the end, you don’t want to be involved with me in any way, then I’ll know. Dealing with rejection would be hard, but I know I’d find it easier than dealing with uncertainty.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Molly.’ Andrew shook his head. ‘Being turned away by Julia must’ve been awful.’

  She looked up at the ceiling, eyes glistening with tears. ‘I can remember everything about that day with such clarity, even the sound of a dog barking nearby, the smell of home-cooking when she opened the door. And I remember standing there, my hand on the pointed iron railing, and she told me she wanted nothing to do with me.’

  Molly pulled a tissue from her pocket and turned away to dab below her eyes. Andrew’s hands lifted slightly as he thought about putting his arms around her, but he drew them back. He couldn’t. He wasn’t ready.

  ‘Could I trouble you for a glass of something cold?’ Molly asked.

  ‘Sure.’ He couldn’t have got up much faster, grateful to have something to do with his hands, something to break the moment. Behind the counter he found two small bottles of orange juice, and he took his time opening each and pouring them into the awaiting glasses. Molly looked like she needed as much time to gather herself as he did.

  ‘So given my birth mother won’t tell me what happened back then,’ Molly began when Andrew returned with the drinks, ‘will you?’

  He downed half the glass and set it on the table. ‘I only found out recently myself. I’m still dealing with it.’ He wanted her to know. She had a right to know. But the other part of him was reluctant to paint Louis in a negative light. Molly may have been afraid at what she might find when she found her birth father, but now she was here he didn’t want anything to frighten her away. A couple of days ago, he’d been wrestling with what to do. Should he trace her and introduce himself? Should he leave well enough alone? But now, he knew. If she walked away because of what their families had concocted together, it’d tear him apart.

  ‘I need to know, Andrew.’ Her voice pleaded. Her hands tugged at the bunched up tissue between her fingers.

  Hearing her use his name brought it home to him how far apart they still were, and would be if he didn’t let her into their lives. He finished his orange juice and sat back in the sofa. And then he started from the beginning.

  ‘I met Julia in the summer of 1983. She was like a breath of fresh air …’ He told her everything from the times they studied together, him helping her with her maths, her helping him in return with his history, a subject he had no passion for and one taught by a teacher he had no affinity with.

  Molly asked him all about Julia. ‘What were her hobbies back then?’ ‘What did the two of you talk about?’ ‘Where did you go together when you dated?’ And for Andrew it was like a film reel had been rolled up and shoved away in a box in the back of his mind for a very
long time, but finally someone had found it in the attic, unravelled it, and he’d been allowed to share in the pleasure and pain of his life all those years ago.

  ‘We were so in love,’ he told her. ‘Every night after school we’d do homework, we’d take long walks. She’d watch me play football, I was often at the side of the hockey pitch watching her game. We were inseparable.’

  He told her more about the time they’d dated, going to the movies together, out for ice creams, when he gave her the special necklace for her fifteenth birthday and then the day she found out she was pregnant.

  ‘We didn’t have much of a chance to talk about it. I’d always been close to my dad, not so much Mum but definitely Dad, and I thought he’d be more supportive when I told him. I can still remember the look on his face and I’ve not seen it since. It wasn’t disappointment, it was as though he truly was gutted, like he’d lost a big part of him, which I couldn’t understand at all.’

  ‘So how did I end up being put up for adoption?’ When she asked, Molly sounded as though she’d detached herself from it being her. It was as though this was someone else’s story and she was gathering facts ready to sort through in her mind.

  Andrew wanted something stronger to drink. A beer or a big glass of red wine, something to take the edge off repeating the story that still sickened him to the stomach. He couldn’t look at Molly. He was so ashamed of his father. And when he told her, she didn’t speak, not for several minutes. Each of them let the story settle, the secrets of the past, the lies that had been told.

  ‘Did you never suspect Julia had had the baby?’ Molly asked.

  He pondered his own gullibility. ‘It was a different time back in the 1980s. Not like today with emails, Facebook, the internet giving you everything you want to know. Back then it was a phone call or a letter to keep in touch, and with Julia being whisked away so quickly and my parents barely pausing for breath before we emigrated, there was never the opportunity to find out anything more. I had no reason not to believe what I’d been told.’