The Bad Mother: The addictive, gripping thriller that will make you question everything

‘Nothing,’ Lucy said through gritted teeth. ‘He can’t still be caught up in traffic.’

‘It must have been pretty serious to close off part of the motorway. We should be grateful Adam wasn’t the one involved in the accident.’

‘I know,’ Lucy said, ‘but I’d told the midwife how supportive he’s been and I felt really stupid turning up without him. He knew how important it was to me. He should have left earlier.’

‘And Adam will be thinking the exact same thing. Now come inside and relax before you race home to give him an earful.’

Lucy was forced to agree, and not simply because she didn’t think she would last the next forty minutes with the baby pressing on her bladder. The delay would give her time to build up the courage to drive back through the tunnel, a journey she would never have chanced if she hadn’t needed to pick up her mum as a stand-in. She expected Adam to be mortified when he found out.

There had been a time when Lucy joked with Adam that she was the better driver, but the one-and-a-half-mile drive beneath the Mersey had become a passage of fear. It stemmed from one particular incident when she had been driving through the tunnel with Adam, not long after she moved in with him and before she could use her baby brain as an excuse. Adam had been forced to yank the steering wheel to keep the car from drifting across the narrow lanes before Lucy even knew what was happening. Tonight, it was her anger alone that had kept her focused on driving between the white lines.

‘He’ll be as disappointed as you,’ Christine said after handing Lucy a cup of chamomile tea and taking a seat next to her on the sofa.

Lucy watched the rising steam curl and twist as she sighed. ‘He knows how much I want him to feel more involved. So far, all he’s been able to do is listen to my complaints about how sick I feel, or how tired I am,’ she said, stopping short of adding the more serious complaints about her ineptitude.

Since the disaster with the flowers a month ago, Lucy’s life had been peppered with similar mishaps, if not on such a grand scale. She wasn’t sure how she had managed to finish her painting of Ralph without calamity, but the end result had been surprisingly good. Lucy had been used to juggling three or four paintings in a month to earn a steady income, but it had been worth the time spent focused on just the one. When she handed over her latest piece to her overjoyed client, she had briefly regretted the call she had made to Hannah to put off her next commission. Her one consolation was that she was now painting for pleasure.

Freed from that sense of trepidation whenever she accepted a new commission, Lucy had made her latest work deliberately abstract. Capturing the ideas she had felt tugging at her imagination the day she had met Hannah, Lucy had produced three canvases that were experimental, to say the least. She had been so pleased with the end result that she had posted photos of them on her website a couple of days ago and although she was apprehensive about how well they would be received, her change in direction had taken the pressure off, as Adam had predicted. The baby was their main priority now.

‘I’ve been trying to get Adam to feel the baby’s kicks,’ she continued. ‘And he said he did the other day but I think he was only saying it to appease me. I want him to get excited about the baby instead of wondering why the hell we ever thought I was ready to be a mother.’

‘But you are ready! And do you seriously think he isn’t excited?’ said Christine with disbelief heavy in her voice. ‘He wants this baby as much as you do, Lucy. When you talk about her and your eyes light up, so do his. Trust me, I’ve been watching.’

‘But when I worry, so does he,’ Lucy said, lifting her cup to her lips and willing the chamomile to work its magic.

She knew Adam hadn’t deliberately missed the class and he had been full of remorse when he phoned to explain how he was sandwiched between two stationary cars on the M60, but she had refused to make him feel better. The last text he had sent had been a follow-up apology to the one he had tried to make during their call when Lucy had been yelling too much to hear it. She also knew that, however bad Adam felt, at some point she would feel worse and there was a good chance she would be the one apologizing by the end of the night. Even so, she couldn’t let go of her anger.

‘At the very least he owes you an apology. I didn’t mean to wreck your night out.’

‘Don’t be silly. I’m just sorry you had to drive over to Liverpool to pick me up. If I’d known I’d be needed, I wouldn’t have had a drink. You don’t think anyone noticed I was a bit squiffy, do you?’

‘You were there for me, that’s the main thing.’

‘Perhaps this should serve as a warning. I should be ready for any eventuality.’

‘I’ve still got three more months to go,’ countered Lucy. ‘And you should be able to go out and celebrate whatever spurious excuse for a celebration you happen to have. What was it this time?’

‘Nothing more than surviving another day at the tax office with double the workload and half the staff.’

‘You should retire if it’s getting too stressful,’ said Lucy, almost believing that the suggestion was purely for her mum’s benefit.

‘I couldn’t afford to, not yet,’ replied Christine. She looked into the depths of her cup and refused to meet Lucy’s gaze when she added, ‘And I hate to say this, but I might not be able to reduce my hours either. I haven’t put in a request yet because I’m not sure it would get approved.’

Lucy took a gulp of scalding tea that burnt her tongue. ‘But you’d be saving them money, surely?’

‘Our department is already cut back to the bone and the savings wouldn’t be enough to offset the disruption. My best chance would be to wait for a fresh round of budget cuts, or yet another reorganization.’ Christine took hold of her daughter’s hand when she added, ‘I want to help you more than anything but I think we both have to be prepared if it doesn’t happen as quickly as we’d like.’

Lucy kept her head down so her mum wouldn’t see the tears brimming.

‘I’m sorry, this is really bad timing,’ Christine said. ‘A more sober me would have picked a better day to bring it up.’

‘It’s not like I was expecting you to be on call twenty-four seven, Mum, and it’s fine. It means Adam will have to work from home a bit more than we were planning, that’s all. His boss doesn’t exactly chain him to the desk. As long as the work’s done, I’m sure no one would mind.’

‘And Adam will look after you, won’t he?’

‘Of course,’ Lucy said, her instinct to defend him overriding her present annoyance. ‘I know he has his moments, like tonight, and he can be …’

‘Awkward?’

Lucy found herself smiling. ‘Something like that,’ she said. ‘But he’s so loving, and incredibly patient.’

‘And I’m sure he’ll make a really good dad.’

Hoping to take advantage of her mum’s loose tongue, Lucy asked, ‘What about my dad? Was he a good father? Up until he died, I would have said he was the best, but what did I know? What was he really like, Mum?’

When the sofa creaked as Christine shifted position, Lucy gave her mum’s hand a tight squeeze. She wasn’t going to make it easy for her to evade the questions she had been dodging for two decades.

‘He loved you more than anyone,’ Christine said. There was a catch in her throat when she added, ‘He idolized you.’

‘If that’s true, then why did he do what he did?’

‘It’s—’

With her heart racing, Lucy shook her head. ‘Don’t say complicated.’

Lucy had never been given much information about the events surrounding her father’s death and as a result, she had spent most of her life making up her own theories. Her greatest fear of late was that whatever had been wrong with her dad had been passed on to his daughter, lying in wait until she was at her most vulnerable.

‘But it was complicated, love,’ Christine said.

‘Complicated how? What was so bad that he felt he couldn’t bear to spend another day with the daughter he idolized?’

‘He wasn’t thinking straight.’

‘I know that,’ Lucy said, her words strangled by twenty years of pain. ‘No one in their right mind jumps off a bridge for no apparent reason. Why did he do it, Mum? Were there any warning signs? Why wasn’t he thinking straight? Was he ill?’

Christine had never spoken of the possibility that Lucy’s dad had suffered from a mental illness, but Lucy was beginning to understand how something like that could creep up on a person. He could have been hiding it from everyone, even himself.

Closing her eyes briefly, Christine bowed her head and refused to meet her daughter’s gaze. ‘It was because of me,’ she said at last. ‘Your dad and I had a strong relationship when we first married and we told each other everything. But as time went on, we got in the habit of saying nothing rather than worrying or hurting each other. Eventually, we fell out of practice of talking at all except through you. You were the glue that kept us together.’

A shudder ran down Lucy’s spine. If she had been the glue that had kept her family together, why wasn’t she sitting there with both her parents? What had been wrong with her dad? What was wrong with her? Lucy could feel herself shutting down in panic – did she really want to know how bad things could get?

‘My biggest regret is that the last time we talked, we argued and I never got the chance to put things right,’ Christine confessed in a whisper.

Her quivering voice gave Lucy the excuse she needed to retreat from the past. ‘Oh, Mum, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have brought it up, but it’s been playing so much on my mind lately.’

‘You’re about to become a parent yourself and it’s natural to want to look back, but you need to concentrate on what lies ahead.’

‘I am,’ Lucy said, her half-empty cup trembling in her hand as she set it down. ‘And if you don’t mind, I’d better make a move.’