Nick had broken the news of his split from Sally to his disappointed family, but chose not to reveal that it was because he’d been Matched with a man. Once the half-year trial period he and Alex had set themselves had passed, he would tell them the truth.
The most onerous part of Nick’s plan had been breaking the news that he was leaving to Sally. She hadn’t looked as pained as he thought she might, but he was sure that it must be a front. Of course she would still be grieving their lost relationship.
He was grateful that she hadn’t sought to make him feel guilty for his decision; it was as if she knew how it felt to be Matched and was aware that sometimes you have no choice but to follow the path your heart leads.
They’d taken a pragmatic approach to dividing up the life they’d shared together. Their savings were split fifty-fifty, and Nick offered her the flat until she was ready for them to sell it. All he needed were his clothes, books and the portfolio of his work – everything else he’d decided could be replaced. He’d spent the last six weeks temporarily living in Alex’s flat, and he’d not spoken to Sally since.
After the monotonous day at work finally came to an end, he prepared to take the train he had booked from Birmingham New Street to London in order to update his travel documents at the Passport Office. He arrived earlier than the train’s scheduled departure so he passed the time in Starbucks with a hot chocolate and a snack.
He picked at the dome of his blueberry muffin and grinned to himself. In the space of just a few months his whole life had been flipped on its head and he’d survived it. And he’d previously had no idea how much joy there was to experience because of it. With a new chapter of his life fast approaching, he couldn’t wait to see what was coming next.
The phone in his pocket vibrated, and taking it out, he saw Sally’s name with a text message.
‘I need to see you,’ it read.
Nick rolled his eyes. He didn’t wish to be cruel but he had nothing left to say to her.
‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ he replied.
‘Please.’
‘What’s this about?’
Her reply came in the form of a picture and the bottom fell out of Nick’s world. It was an ultrasound scan.
Chapter 70
ELLIE
An agitated Ellie drummed her fingernails against her glass-topped desk and stared at the painting on the wall ahead of her. She’d spent £40,000 on the canvas two years earlier, purchased on impulse when she spotted it on an easel in the window of a Knightsbridge gallery. It was a painting of a little girl with huge green eyes, dressed in a blue coat, who stared beyond her framed confines and out into the world. A group of adults surrounded her, standing with their backs to her like they hadn’t noticed she was there. She was very skinny, almost waif-like, and through the gap in her unbuttoned coat, under her top, the outline of her heart was barely visible. You could only see it if you looked closely. There was something about the forlorn expression in the girl’s face and in the depth of her eyes that Ellie often lost herself for moments at a time. Almost everyone failed to notice the child’s heart and Ellie never felt the need to point it out. But for Tim, in fact, it had been the first thing he’d spotted when he first visited her office.
When Ellie stared at the painting now, she thought of Tim, and more precisely, why, like the girl, he had chosen to hide something.
The moment she saw Tim’s mother in the photos he’d kept hidden from her, she recognised her. She was someone she’d worked closely with some fifteen years earlier. Samantha Ward. Though much younger in the pictures with her son, she was a lab assistant in a team Ellie had put together when she first discovered the Match Your DNA gene. Ellie was sure Samantha was one of the members of the group she’d nicknamed ‘the seedlings’ – a batch of colleagues she’d tested her theory on. Only back then, when Ellie was desperate for guinea pigs, she hadn’t necessarily followed the rules.
Ellie knew Samantha as a grey haired, softly spoke middle-aged woman. She’d said little, and as Ellie outgrew the lab and her staff, Samantha, like most of the others back then, slipped from her radar after they were no longer of use to her.
She had saved the photo of Tim and his mother on her iPad and opened it up once again. There was an unquestionable resemblance between mother and son, and they shared the same warm smile and hazel, almond-shaped eyes. Tim didn’t talk of her frequently, but when he did it was always in glowing terms. He was grateful to her for working ludicrous hours in multiple jobs so that she could afford to send him on school trips and to help support him at university. Ellie knew he still felt the pain of his loss from her sudden heart attack.
Ellie was positive it wasn’t coincidence that the son of one of her former employees had come into her life, and she was desperate to know why. Did she really know Tim at all? The simplest solution was to question him face to face, but Ellie wanted to find the answers herself.
‘Is something wrong?’ Kat asked, when Ellie walked into her head of personnel’s office unannounced.
‘I need your help and I need to keep this between the two of us,’ Ellie began, and they sat down on the sofa. Ellie inched closer to Kat and spoke quietly. ‘You’ve told me before that you pride yourself on never forgetting a face, is that right?’
‘Um yes,’ Kat replied nervously.
‘The night of the Christmas party, you told me you thought you recognised my partner from a job interview here, only he had a different name – Matthew, I think you said?’
Kat nodded.
‘How sure are you?’
‘Please don’t be angry with me,’ Kat said, her voice trembling.
‘I’m not, why?’
‘The day after the party, I went back through Matthew’s file and called up his interview notes and his CV. It was just irritating me that I might’ve got him mixed up.’
Ellie’s heartbeat quickened. ‘And what did you find?’
Kat moved quickly across the office, her high heels clicking against the marble floor like tap shoes. She flicked though folders in a filing cabinet, then passed one with a white sticker on the front to Ellie. She felt her heart sink when she read the words ‘Matthew Ward’. He was definitely Samantha’s son.
‘I’m sorry, I should have come to you sooner, but I didn’t know how to approach you about it. His online record has been deleted from our files, but I always keep a hard copy too. There’s no photograph of him in here though. Each time I tried to use the digital camera, the picture came out blank. I tried with my iPhone, but that was blank too. I remember joking with him about it.’
‘Have you told anyone else about this?’
‘Oh God no, of course not.’
‘Thank you,’ Ellie said, then left Kat’s office and hurried back to her own. Ula glanced up at her from her laptop and was about to ask her a question but stopped herself as Ellie closed the door firmly behind her.
She sat behind her desk and opened the folder apprehensively. She scanned the copy of Matthew Ward’s CV, and compared it to the details her researchers had compiled about Tim when she first learned of her Match. Both worked in the computing field but that’s where the similarities ended. Everything from the location of where they were schooled to their dates of birth, home town, exam qualifications, email addresses and National Insurance numbers were different.
The most onerous part of Nick’s plan had been breaking the news that he was leaving to Sally. She hadn’t looked as pained as he thought she might, but he was sure that it must be a front. Of course she would still be grieving their lost relationship.
He was grateful that she hadn’t sought to make him feel guilty for his decision; it was as if she knew how it felt to be Matched and was aware that sometimes you have no choice but to follow the path your heart leads.
They’d taken a pragmatic approach to dividing up the life they’d shared together. Their savings were split fifty-fifty, and Nick offered her the flat until she was ready for them to sell it. All he needed were his clothes, books and the portfolio of his work – everything else he’d decided could be replaced. He’d spent the last six weeks temporarily living in Alex’s flat, and he’d not spoken to Sally since.
After the monotonous day at work finally came to an end, he prepared to take the train he had booked from Birmingham New Street to London in order to update his travel documents at the Passport Office. He arrived earlier than the train’s scheduled departure so he passed the time in Starbucks with a hot chocolate and a snack.
He picked at the dome of his blueberry muffin and grinned to himself. In the space of just a few months his whole life had been flipped on its head and he’d survived it. And he’d previously had no idea how much joy there was to experience because of it. With a new chapter of his life fast approaching, he couldn’t wait to see what was coming next.
The phone in his pocket vibrated, and taking it out, he saw Sally’s name with a text message.
‘I need to see you,’ it read.
Nick rolled his eyes. He didn’t wish to be cruel but he had nothing left to say to her.
‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ he replied.
‘Please.’
‘What’s this about?’
Her reply came in the form of a picture and the bottom fell out of Nick’s world. It was an ultrasound scan.
Chapter 70
ELLIE
An agitated Ellie drummed her fingernails against her glass-topped desk and stared at the painting on the wall ahead of her. She’d spent £40,000 on the canvas two years earlier, purchased on impulse when she spotted it on an easel in the window of a Knightsbridge gallery. It was a painting of a little girl with huge green eyes, dressed in a blue coat, who stared beyond her framed confines and out into the world. A group of adults surrounded her, standing with their backs to her like they hadn’t noticed she was there. She was very skinny, almost waif-like, and through the gap in her unbuttoned coat, under her top, the outline of her heart was barely visible. You could only see it if you looked closely. There was something about the forlorn expression in the girl’s face and in the depth of her eyes that Ellie often lost herself for moments at a time. Almost everyone failed to notice the child’s heart and Ellie never felt the need to point it out. But for Tim, in fact, it had been the first thing he’d spotted when he first visited her office.
When Ellie stared at the painting now, she thought of Tim, and more precisely, why, like the girl, he had chosen to hide something.
The moment she saw Tim’s mother in the photos he’d kept hidden from her, she recognised her. She was someone she’d worked closely with some fifteen years earlier. Samantha Ward. Though much younger in the pictures with her son, she was a lab assistant in a team Ellie had put together when she first discovered the Match Your DNA gene. Ellie was sure Samantha was one of the members of the group she’d nicknamed ‘the seedlings’ – a batch of colleagues she’d tested her theory on. Only back then, when Ellie was desperate for guinea pigs, she hadn’t necessarily followed the rules.
Ellie knew Samantha as a grey haired, softly spoke middle-aged woman. She’d said little, and as Ellie outgrew the lab and her staff, Samantha, like most of the others back then, slipped from her radar after they were no longer of use to her.
She had saved the photo of Tim and his mother on her iPad and opened it up once again. There was an unquestionable resemblance between mother and son, and they shared the same warm smile and hazel, almond-shaped eyes. Tim didn’t talk of her frequently, but when he did it was always in glowing terms. He was grateful to her for working ludicrous hours in multiple jobs so that she could afford to send him on school trips and to help support him at university. Ellie knew he still felt the pain of his loss from her sudden heart attack.
Ellie was positive it wasn’t coincidence that the son of one of her former employees had come into her life, and she was desperate to know why. Did she really know Tim at all? The simplest solution was to question him face to face, but Ellie wanted to find the answers herself.
‘Is something wrong?’ Kat asked, when Ellie walked into her head of personnel’s office unannounced.
‘I need your help and I need to keep this between the two of us,’ Ellie began, and they sat down on the sofa. Ellie inched closer to Kat and spoke quietly. ‘You’ve told me before that you pride yourself on never forgetting a face, is that right?’
‘Um yes,’ Kat replied nervously.
‘The night of the Christmas party, you told me you thought you recognised my partner from a job interview here, only he had a different name – Matthew, I think you said?’
Kat nodded.
‘How sure are you?’
‘Please don’t be angry with me,’ Kat said, her voice trembling.
‘I’m not, why?’
‘The day after the party, I went back through Matthew’s file and called up his interview notes and his CV. It was just irritating me that I might’ve got him mixed up.’
Ellie’s heartbeat quickened. ‘And what did you find?’
Kat moved quickly across the office, her high heels clicking against the marble floor like tap shoes. She flicked though folders in a filing cabinet, then passed one with a white sticker on the front to Ellie. She felt her heart sink when she read the words ‘Matthew Ward’. He was definitely Samantha’s son.
‘I’m sorry, I should have come to you sooner, but I didn’t know how to approach you about it. His online record has been deleted from our files, but I always keep a hard copy too. There’s no photograph of him in here though. Each time I tried to use the digital camera, the picture came out blank. I tried with my iPhone, but that was blank too. I remember joking with him about it.’
‘Have you told anyone else about this?’
‘Oh God no, of course not.’
‘Thank you,’ Ellie said, then left Kat’s office and hurried back to her own. Ula glanced up at her from her laptop and was about to ask her a question but stopped herself as Ellie closed the door firmly behind her.
She sat behind her desk and opened the folder apprehensively. She scanned the copy of Matthew Ward’s CV, and compared it to the details her researchers had compiled about Tim when she first learned of her Match. Both worked in the computing field but that’s where the similarities ended. Everything from the location of where they were schooled to their dates of birth, home town, exam qualifications, email addresses and National Insurance numbers were different.
