55. Adam

55

ADAM

U p until I register the two women in front of me, my brain has been preoccupied with whether I can persuade Nat to believe I was just passing by. I’m holding in my gloved hand a takeaway box from an organic cafe down the road that’s stuffed to the gills with harissa chicken, grains, and some kind of miso-roasted aubergine thing that looks delicious.

It’s not that I believe my girlfriend willingly skirts danger with her eating habits, but I know how fully immersed she can get in her job. We’re both workaholics, but only one of us has a body that attacks its own insulin supply, so here we are.

Now, though, I register the panic on Nat’s face at the same time as I spot the slow recognition on Adelaide’s face. After all, I’ve changed a lot more than she has. I’m no longer a shaven headed, angry kid.

‘Sorry, Nat,’ Evan says breathlessly from behind me.

‘Mum, I—’ Nat begins, her beautiful face stricken.

‘Hi, Adelaide,’ I say warmly.

‘Adam?’ Adelaide asks incredulously .

Nat’s head whips from me to her mother. ‘What?’

Since meeting Nat, I’ve assumed she isn’t aware of the steps her mum took to build a relationship with her son’s attacker all those years ago. She’s certainly never mentioned it. And, given Adelaide’s insistence at the time that her visits weren’t something she was disclosing to her family, I’ve never had any reason to think she’d make her daughter aware of them.

Therefore, I’ve never so much as hinted at the extent to which Adelaide has helped me. There was a moment the other night, when Nat was fretting about how to sit her brother down and come clean about our relationship. She mentioned that she might sound her mum out first, and I made some vague comment to the effect that her mum might be more amenable than Stephen. Nothing more than that.

So when Nat sees me grinning at her mother and Adelaide positively beaming at me, I get the feeling that this will be a bombshell of epic proportions for her.

Adelaide, it seems, is handling my appearance far better than her daughter. ‘Oh my God!’ she cries, coming towards me, her arms already outstretched. ‘How on earth are you here? Do you two know each other?’

‘Hi, Adelaide,’ I say, opting for full-wattage charm as a master stroke of deflection. ‘You look fantastic.’ I allow her to envelop me in a hug whose genuine warmth has my throat constricting with emotion. While I’ve never forgotten her kindness, it’s only now hitting me how much of her compassion and empathy she’s passed onto her daughter. (The origin of Nat’s impressive feistiness I’m still unclear on. )

‘Oh, stop it,’ she trills, hitting me playfully on the arm and drawing back so she can look at me. ‘Look at you! So handsome! And looking so well! Goodness, it’s wonderful to see you thriving.’

We beam at each other for a moment while Nat stalks over to us. ‘Uh—do we know each other? How about how you two know each other?’

She crosses her arms and glares at us, and I hastily release her mother. A quick glance around tells me Evan and the rest of the team are staring at us with indecent interest and that a speedy migration of our little soap opera moment would be wise.

‘I’ll explain,’ I tell her, hastily swallowing the sweetheart I was about to tack onto the end. It seems both these women have a bombshell incoming, and I’d like to retain control of this rapidly unravelling situation to whatever extent is possible. ‘How about I take you both around the corner for some lunch?’

‘Mum and I were supposed to be going for lunch,’ Nat says, still glaring at me.

I’m wavering between apologising for messing up their lunch plans and pointing out to her that urgent disclosure by all parties is now more pressing when Adelaide speaks.

‘Let’s do as Adam suggests. I want to know how you two know each other.’

‘Ditto,’ Nat growls with a death stare as she grabs her coat borderline violently off a nearby hanger.

The most expedient option available to us is Soho House on adjacent Greek Street. I usher the three of us into the club and request their most discreet table. Thankfully, the host has a small private room tucked away on the second floor. There’s a cosy fire crackling in the small grate, but the energy emanating from my beautiful girlfriend is positively arctic.

‘Talk,’ she says, shimmying out of her coat and throwing it on the sofa on one side of the room.

Adelaide and I exchange a glance, and I realise that, as the only party privy to both of these clandestine relationships, I should probably clarify with the broadest brushstrokes what the hell is actually going on here.

‘Adelaide, Nat and I are dating. We’ve been seeing each other for a few weeks and I know she’s been wanting to talk to you about it.’ I turn to Nat and take her hand. ‘Sweetheart, I haven’t seen your mum for years, I swear, but she was very, very kind to me after I was sentenced.’

Both mother and daughter react in different ways, albeit with equal levels of emotion. Adelaide’s little laugh is one of utter delight and wonder, whereas Nat’s huge brown eyes fill instantly with tears.

‘Did you visit him?’ she asks her mum in a whisper. I’m vastly encouraged by the fact that she hasn’t tried to pull her hand away from mine.

Adelaide opens her mouth, and I sense she’s going to offer some justification or apology, but she doesn’t. She glances at our joined hands and gives a simple nod. ‘Yes, I did.’

I wait. I want to give Nat space to process. To ask her own questions. Her view of what happened two decades ago, of the man I am, is vastly different from what it was a few weeks ago, so I hope she can find it within herself to retrospectively forgive her mother for taking an action that might, until last month, have felt like a betrayal of their family .

‘More than once?’ she asks.

I remain silent and defer to Adelaide.

‘Yes,’ she says, looking at me now. ‘I visited Adam monthly, I think, for as long as he was in prison. Is that right?’

I nod. ‘Yeah. And then we kept in touch by email after I was released. She knew about the job with Anton,’ I tell Nat. ‘We had coffee years later, too—maybe five or six years later?’

A glance at Adelaide is all I need to know that she remembers. She needs no reminder of how the tables had turned by the time that overdue coffee rolled around, how much I was thriving under Anton’s tutelage, working my arse off for Wolff while I built OfficeScape.

She needs no reminder of her own intense concerns back then over Noel’s lack of meaningful work. Of how, days after our coffee, I emailed her to let her know that Anton and I had had an excellent lunch with one of the deans at the London School of Economics and extolled the virtues of Noel Bennett’s expertise in the very Financial Systems professorship he was looking to recruit for.

It was an inadequate gesture of thanks towards a woman who had shown me such forgiveness and compassion in the face of the most inhuman act of my life—towards her own son, no less.

‘It was just a quick catch up,’ I say lamely. ‘We haven’t really chatted much since then.’

‘Wow,’ Nat says, shaking her head.

‘Are you okay darling?’ Adelaide asks, leaning forward with concern.

‘Yeah.’ Nat’s voice is so low, so shaky, that her words are barely audible. ‘God, I had no idea. But I’m so, so glad he had you.’ Her bottom lip trembles on the you , and she presses her hand to her mouth. ‘Jesus, he had no one else. Thank God he had you.’

‘Oh, my darling,’ Adelaide says, her voice tremoring. ‘Don’t worry. He had me. He had his fabulous lawyer. And that lovely man, Anton. We looked out for him.’

‘But how?’ Nat says. ‘I mean, how come you ended up visiting him?’

‘Your mum is a very generous, compassionate person,’ I tell her. ‘And somehow she found it in herself to see beyond my incredibly fucked-up persona and reach out.’

‘It wasn’t like that,’ Adelaide protests, shaking her head disapprovingly. ‘The entire trial was ridiculous. Obviously, Noel and I had no idea, until we sat through it, quite what Adam had been through. It was awful. Just awful. And somehow, that judge failed to show any regard whatsoever for the future of a young man who’d been dealt such a deeply, deeply tragic hand. So I sought out Anne, his lawyer, after he’d been sentenced, and I got her to persuade Adam to agree to a visitation.’

She leans over and pats my hand. ‘I wanted to look him in the eye and tell him that I knew that crime didn’t define him. I wanted him to know that someone on the outside saw him, and cared, and was sorry that he’d been let down so very badly.’

Nat is crying now, big tears rolling down her cheeks. She nods. ‘Good. That’s good. And did Dad and Winky know you were visiting him?’

Adelaide draws back. ‘God, no. Your father was so distraught—he blamed himself for putting your brother in harm’s way, as you know. Still does. And you were still so little, and Winky was healing. I didn’t want him to think for a moment that I wasn’t firmly in his corner.’

She pauses and takes a sip of her water, considering. ‘I regret that, actually. I was trying to protect him, but really, I only perpetuated a silly myth that I should have tried to debunk. A myth that someone who commits a crime like that must be all evil. When everyone at this table knows that is categorically not true.’

Jesus fuck, my eyes are misting. I give us about three minutes before we’re all holding hands around the table and openly weeping.

‘Amen to that,’ Nat says with almost comedic emphasis. I release her hand and wipe the dampness from her nearest cheek.

Adelaide catches the gesture and smiles at us fondly. ‘And would you like to expand upon how you’ve come to join the Adam Wright fan club? Though, god knows, he’s an easy man to be a fan of. He’s such a good boy.’

I laugh, because it’s been a very long time since anyone has described me as a good boy.

Nat grimaces. I suspect she’s more worried about confessing her hypo attack than any other part of our story. Maybe I can help her downplay it.

‘It’s definitely an interesting story,’ I tell Adelaide, picking up my menu. ‘But how about we order before we get stuck into it? I’d feel a lot better if we got your daughter some lunch.’