Читать книгу The Woman In The Mirror: A haunting gothic story of obsession, tinged with suspense - Rebecca James, Rebecca James - Страница 12

Chapter 4

He left before she woke the next morning. Rachel was glad, fixed herself coffee and opened her emails. Her inbox was filled with messages of congratulation. They’d made a mint on some of the more expensive works last night and several write-ups had already appeared in the morning’s coverage, calling the Square Peg launch ‘a triumph’ and ‘an enthralling odyssey into the city’s burning talent’. Paul had written with news that tickets for next month’s exhibition had sold out, and that a renowned London artist wished to make an appearance at the weekend. Rachel summoned Paul for brunch and closed her tablet.

It took minutes to get ready. Despite her lack of sleep, the bathroom mirror told her she looked good. With neat brown hair, warm hazel eyes and a smattering of freckles across her nose, Rachel was no supermodel, but she had a fine figure, great skin and she carried herself well. For a long time she had puzzled over the roots of her appearance. Most people didn’t have to – their parents were right in front of them, or they had pictures to go on, blood relatives to join the dots – and she had thought so many times about what a phenomenon that would be. Imagining her mother and father was a bit like imagining her own hypothetical child, as much of a mystery and a miracle. For she had no positioning in the world, no biological foundation: she wasn’t the branch or the leaf on a tree, running deep into the earth, permanent and enduring; she was her own shrub, small and lonely, with roots barely clinging to the soil.

Rachel had got along fine with her adoptive parents, Maggie and Greg. They had longed for a baby and been unable to have one of their own, and when they’d welcomed her at a week old, it had been the answer to their prayers. She was lucky, she knew: they’d been loving, supportive, attentive, and truthful with her, explaining her adoption as soon as she was old enough to understand. But, really, one was never old enough to understand something like that, to properly get to grips with and accept deep inside without umbrage or bitterness that you weren’t loved enough to be kept in the first place. ‘We chose you,’ Maggie used to say over and over, ‘because you were special. We adored you from the second we laid eyes on you.’ And Rachel used to take reassurance from this – that she might have been cast aside by one set of parents but at least she’d been picked up by another – until her older, more complicated years, when she had learned about the adoption process and that Maggie and Greg hadn’t selected her, she had simply been the first baby to come along. It was hard to get a baby, most childless couples wished for babies and there weren’t enough to go round, so no wonder her adoptive parents had felt she was meant to be.

Rachel knew this was ungrateful and unhelpful, so she’d stifled the truth of her emotions and instead focused on the future, always the next thing, getting ahead, refusing to look behind. When she’d referenced her mother in the gallery speech, she’d been remembering how Maggie used to describe her as ‘bloody-minded’. It was meant, for the most part, affectionately, but in her teenage years it had caused toxic fights. Rachel’s stubbornness, her iron will, whether it concerned dating a boy or staying out or refusing to finish her studies, came from a place that neither Maggie nor Greg could trace in themselves, a place so remote and unknown that it served only to remind them what was missing. That Rachel had a family out there who were just like her, and it was their blood that was running through her veins, not the Wrights’.

Maggie and Greg had died within a year of each other when she was eighteen, so she hadn’t had all that much of them either. At the time she’d mourned, but she never shed as many tears over them as she had over her imagined, other parents. It had seemed thankless and hurtful to pursue her heritage while Maggie and Greg were alive, but after they went there was nothing stopping her. Rachel knew she’d been born in England to English parents, and had ideas about travelling there, to some charming retreat or else a townhouse in London, and being welcomed by a woman smelling of vanilla sponge, a friendly wirehaired dog trailing at her feet. However, her ideas came to nothing and her search was short-lived: Rachel discovered inside a week that her birth mother was dead and she had no father listed. That was when she’d decided to close the door on the past. She spoke to no one about it. Nobody knew she was adopted and she preferred it that way. Keeping a lid on her feelings was a trick she’d learned early on, and it had certainly protected her since.

The sound of the mail hitting the mat pulled her from her thoughts. She grabbed her jacket and bent to scoop up the letters to look at later, but a single white envelope drew her up short. It was one of those envelopes that made you look twice. There was nothing menacing about it, nothing especially unusual but for the UK postal address and a red stamp reading STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL.

She picked it up and turned it over. Private documents enclosed. There was a return address, a Quakers Oatley & Sons Solicitors in Mayfair, London.

She ran her nail along the seal and opened it.