Read Online Lilia's Secret by Erina Reddan - Free Book Online

small village just outside Mexico City. He lived there in a priest’s house, carrying the sacrament for him when they went to visit the sick, polishing the silver candlesticks, drying the dishes. He was very lucky.’
    â€˜Did he find out why they didn’t take him back to his mother’s house?’
    â€˜When he was seventeen and ready to leave, he did ask. His priest would only say something vague about knowing he’d run away from a bad woman.’
    â€˜No wonder your father was troubled.’
    â€˜He was the lucky one. Poor Juan, at eight, was left behind on his own with her. When he eventually escaped two years later he was caught stealing an apple and drafted into the army – a terrible place for a young, sensitive boy who was used to being abused.’
    â€˜God. How come you’re such a happy person, coming from all that?’
    â€˜It didn’t happen to me.’ He shrugged. ‘They made the way clear for us to be happy. It would be wrong not to be.’
    Even though it was late when we finally stopped talking, I lay awake.
    What makes a woman so cruel her own children need to escape from her? What kind of a woman could kill somebody she’s made love to? Is evil a disease that’s transmitted through the genes? Could there be something deep in Andrés that even he didn’t know about?
    If I had a child, would I turn into my mother, hard and bitter? If I had a child, would I turn into my father, and stop coping?
    I couldn’t have a child, but perhaps Andrés could not be without one. Looking back, it wasn’t as though this was new. Unlike other men I’d gone out with, he stopped to cluck at babies in somebody’s arms or tucked big-eyed into a pram.
    â€˜Sweet,’ I’d thought. ‘What a lovely man.’ Of course, now I saw it as an early warning sign.

    The next morning I got up and went for my run without Andrés again. I ran faster than I ever had around the cliff path. I heard the waves crash against the rocks, and felt the bite of the fresh sun as sweat slicked the back of my neck. When I got back he handed me the carrot and apple juice he’d made.
    â€˜Why didn’t you wake me?’ he asked.
    I shrugged, towelling down my face. ‘You looked so cosy,’ I said.
    â€˜I suppose I look “cosy” every other morning too, but that hasn’t stopped you shaking me into my runners.’
    I shrugged again and drank the juice down in one go. ‘Maybe you looked sweeter than usual.’
    He looked at me scratching my wrist but didn’t comment. I showered and dressed and got my bag ready for work, just like any other day; I kissed Andrés goodbye on the cheek. He gave me a sidelong look but, again, didn’t say anything.
    At work, I sat at my computer ignoring the software package I’d been working on, scratching my wrist until blood seeped through the chapped skin. I watched the small patterns it made and I doodled square boxes inside square boxes on my notebook.
    Eventually I typed Lilia de Las Flores into Google. There was nothing relevant. Andrés had said that his grandfather’s name had been Javier-Alberto Cohen when he’d left Spain in the early 1900s. After meeting Lilia, he’d changed his name to de Las Flores because she reminded him of flowers, so she had changed her name as well. Romantic, wasn’t it? Yet it only took three or four years before he was gone. I guess he just got fed up with the demands of babies and the ordinariness of it all. I couldn’t blame him.
    I typed in Javier-Alberto Cohen and, as I’d expected, nothing came up.

    Over the next week I found myself poring over the newspapers for stories of murder and unhappiness; stories of violence where even families destroyed one another. I moved politely around Andrés and he watched me. At night I lay awake beside him.
    On the third day I rang him from the office. ‘I have to work late