‘You remember.’ She flicked out her tongue to wet her lips. ‘Kane Wheeler? I never realised he had joined up all those years ago.’
Her father stared out of the window, blinking slowly. Mattie had no idea she’d held her breath until he suddenly spoke again.
‘What are we going to tell Mathilda about the Wheeler boy, Mary?’
Mattie opened her mouth then closed it.
‘What about Kane?’ she asked cautiously. Hating herself.
‘He’s gone, Mary. And we’re going to have to be the people to tell her. It’s going to crush her.’
‘What did you do?’ she asked carefully. Not certain that she should be doing it but unable to help herself.
She had Kane’s side of the story, but she
still needed to know—to understand—what her father had thought all those years ago.
Why he’d never told her the truth.
‘I had to help him, Mary,’ her father said firmly. ‘Mathilda won’t see it that way, of course, but that can’t be helped. There was no other way. That young Wheeler boy doesn’t deserve to get pulled down by the rest of his abominable family.’
‘Where did he go?’ Mattie could barely recognise her own voice. She had no idea how she managed to sound so calm, so collected.
‘It’s best you don’t know, Mary. It’s best that no one knows. He’s given the police enough to send those brothers of his away for a decent length of time. So neither they nor that father of theirs can find out where Kane is. They would hunt the kid down and they make him pay.’
Mattie blinked. It almost sounded as though her father was protective of Kane, yet all these years she’d thought her parents had hated him.
How could she have been so wrong?
Her heart felt as though it was about to beat right out of her chest.
‘Surely he could have said goodbye to... Mathilda.’ She faltered for a moment.
Her father snorted, though there was still tenderness in his voice. ‘Don’t be foolish, Mary—do you think our little Mathilda would have left it at that? She’d have inveigled the whole story out of him—you know that Wheeler boy would do anything for her—and our daughter is nothing if not hot-headed.’
A proud smile touched his lips now, despite everything.
‘She would no doubt march up to the Wheelers’ house and give the lot of them a piece of her mind. But those boys are both facing jail sentences so how safe do you think she would be, Mary? As it stands, they have no idea where Kane is now, or that I had anything to do with it. This way both the boy, and our family, are guaranteed to stay safe.’
Mattie started, then went cold. When Kane had told her, he’d deliberately left out the more sordid facts. The danger he’d been in.
Plus, her father was right, she had had a tendency to act before thinking back then, and Kane’s brothers had never been the most rational, predictable of boys, and both had racked up a long list of violent offences, as far as she was aware. She could have caused no end of trouble not just for herself but for her whole family if she’d gone off at the deep end on them.
‘Besides, he asked me not to say anything to her.’
Mattie turned back, watching her father carefully.
‘Who asked you not to say anything?’
‘The Wheeler lad, of course.’ He clicked his tongue impatiently.
‘Why not?’ she pressed, reining in her impatience when he didn’t elaborate.
Her father pulled his eyebrows together, the slight shake of his head almost imperceptible. ‘Shame, I imagine, Mary. He didn’t want Mathilda to know. I suppose he thought it would change the way she looked at him. Taint it slightly. He’d always been the only one in that dreadful family to stay out of trouble with the police. I think he wanted to preserve that image she had of him, rather than know the truth.’
Mattie stared. She could practically feel the cogs spinning and slipping in her head. She probably wouldn’t have understood at the time, but in hindsight it made sense that Kane might want to hide the truth from her. But her father? All these years she’d thought her father hated Kane. She’d imagined that he’d have taken any opportunity to convince her that her first boyfriend hadn’t been worthy of her.
Instead, the truth was that her father had protected the one secret Kane hadn’t wanted her to know. And she loved them both for it.