The Real Katie Lavender by Erica James Page B

smallest one and repositioned the umbrella so that she wasn’t in the full glare of the sun. She could see why everyone was sitting outside in preference to the gloomy bar: the attractive lawned garden sloped gently down towards the river, where a variety of boats were neatly moored along the towpath. In the shade of a willow tree, its branches dipping into the water, a man and two small children were surrounded by a mob of persistent ducks. The children were flinging bits of bread at the ducks with nervous excitement, their arms moving with sudden jerky movements, their laughter shrill. The setting was as perfect as the weather, and despite the reason she was here, Katie felt herself relax. It really was a perfectly sublime summer afternoon with a hot sun shimmering in a hazy blue sky.
    Her sandwich duly arrived, and as she hungrily tucked in, Katie scanned the other tables. It wouldn’t be beyond the realms of possibility for Stirling Nightingale to be here. For all she knew, this could be his local pub. But as far as she could see, there was no one at any of the tables who resembled the man she’d seen on her computer.
    The man who was her father . . .
    Her biological father, she corrected herself. No matter what transpired, Dad would always be her real father.
    As a child, you never really think about how much your parents love each other, but Dad must have loved Fay to an extraordinary extent to forgive her for what she’d done, and then to pretend to the world that the child she’d conceived with another man was his own.
    How difficult had it been for him? Had there been a time when he’d struggled to like Katie, never mind bond with her? She would never know. And that saddened her, because now that the seed had been sown, she didn’t know if she would ever be able to rid herself of the doubt. All she could do was rely on the memories she had of her father. A patient and quiet undemonstrative man, he had always been someone to whom she could turn. If she’d been upset over something that had happened at school, he would be the one to calm her and make her realize that it was nothing more than a storm in a teacup. He was always able to get things in perspective for her.
    Mum, on the other hand, was the sparky one of the two. When the mood took her, she was her very own localized storm in a teacup, who could whip up a commotion in seconds flat and out of nothing. Dad had joked that she ran on high-energy fuel and didn’t have a brake pedal. They were opposites in just about every way, but as everyone said of them, they made a great team. Not just as husband and wife, but as business partners. For more than twenty-five years they had jointly run an antiquarian bookshop, and for a couple who lived and worked together, Katie couldn’t recall a single heavy-duty argument between them. Maybe that was because Dad wasn’t the argumentative type. He never let things get to him.
    After Dad’s death, Mum had carried on running the bookshop, but as she later admitted to Katie, her heart was no longer in it without Dad. What had once been a great source of pleasure, a real labour of love, became a millstone around her neck, and within a year she had sold up. That was when she moved to Brighton, to start a new life. Albeit a tragically short new life.
    Behind the wheel of her car again – it was a yellow Mini Cooper that had once belonged to her mother, and which Katie had nicknamed the Custard Cream – she switched the satnav back on. She wondered whether by tracking down her biological father, she was also about to start a new life.
    Was this what her mother had wanted for her?
    The white-painted gate to The Meadows was open, and practising aloud what she was going to say, Katie turned into the drive and followed the pretty tree-lined sweep of it to the front of the white house. It was gracefully proportioned and perfectly symmetrical, with two columns either side of a front door that was painted a very dark shade of