The Secret Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page B

practice big enough?
    ‘Did that really just happen?’
    ‘I can’t believe it either.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘Did you ever suspect?’
    ‘Of course not.’ I drank more, until even the creamy bitterness reminded me only of Dad. Mum had the refined palate of a woman who could sip a merlot and comment on the hint of chocolate in its base, but to me, all wine tasted like vinegar. Instead, Dad and I shared a fanatical obsession with beer – all kinds of beer actually; ginger beers and stouts and pilsners and porters. He had a trellis in his backyard where he grew a series of hops varieties, and every few months we’d spend a whole evening cooking from scratch our own elaborate home brew. The last time, just a few weeks earlier, I’d soaked the grain at home during the day while I was at school, and then driven across the suburbs in my little hatchback, the giant pot nestled like a baby beneath a seatbelt. It took us nearly six hours that night to boil and strain the grain to just the right temperature, then to cool it and to apply the yeast, and to transfer it into a vat to ferment.
    In another few weeks, it would be ready to bottle, and we’d spend half a day on a weekend chatting while we decanted it into glass bottles with bottle caps pressed on to seal it.
    I thought I’d inherited from Dad that love of the intricacies of the craft, not to mention the satisfaction of the yeasty taste at the end of all of the work and waiting.
    ‘But everyone says I look just like them. Don’t I have Mum’s smile? Don’t I have Dad’s eyes?’
    ‘I thought so too.’
    ‘So everything they’ve ever said to me is a lie?’
    ‘I can understand why you would say that,’ Ted said, after a moment. ‘But it’s not true. For all of their faults, you can’t deny that your parents have genuinely adored you.’
    ‘If they adore me, Ted, why would they lie to me?’
    ‘I have absolutely no idea.’
    ‘I’m only thirty-eight. Surely even thirty-eight years ago people understood that denying someone the truth about their birth was not going to be great for them.’
    ‘Well . . . I don’t know about that , honey. I’ve seen the news about this forced adoption controversy, it really sounds like young mothers weren’t even given a choice about keeping their kids. Hiding the actual adoption from the child is not much of a stretch from there.’
    ‘But . . . why , Ted? Why weren’t they given a choice?’ I’d been stoic until that moment, but the idea suddenly slipped through my shock-cocoon and I felt myself dissolving. This concept was so monstrous and outrageous that I couldn’t even stand to think that it had anything to do with me . When I spoke again, my whispered words were uneven, punctuated by the tremors of barely restrained tears. ‘Are you seriously saying that women’s babies were just taken from them?’
    ‘Well . . . as I understand it, yes . I think it was about the shame of babies being born out of marriage,’ Ted murmured, sliding his arm around me. ‘We can do some reading . . . but I am pretty sure that single women, especially young single women who were found to be pregnant were taken to maternity homes, like the one Megan must have worked in. I think the mums were often coerced into signing the paperwork, and the babies were taken after the birth and adopted out from there.’
    ‘But I just can’t even believe Mum would be a part of such a thing,’ I whispered. ‘Surely that must be some mistake, maybe she didn’t understand what was happening there. But then, even if that was true—’ I was thinking out loud now, and I sat away from Ted so that I could stare at him, searching the blue depths of his eyes, seeking comfort. ‘Even if she didn’t know . . . she definitely knew about the adoption. And hiding that from me? Mum has always talked to me about everything .’ I slumped again and leant into him, and a sob escaped. ‘I thought she did.’ Ted pressed a soft kiss to the side of