By John Barrett Lee

Amélie scoops up her son, burying her nose in his fine red hair and breathing in its clean smell of shampoo and sleep.

Joseph rests his head on her shoulder. ‘I wish Mamie was coming. But she’s in heaven now.’

‘That’s right, mon cher,’ Amélie says softly, feeling the tug of grief she’s kept at bay all morning. ‘She’s gone to be with God and Grandpa Michael.’

She sets him down gently and smooths his hair. ‘Now then, mon lapin – go and see if Auntie Rachel’s here yet.’

‘Oui, Maman.’ Joseph nods, then hops to the window like a rabbit.

She checks her phone, then paces into the kitchen to glare at the clock on the wall.

Where the bloody hell are you, Rach? she thinks. Ten minutes late.

The tickets for the 15.48 from Paddington are non-transferable, and it’s thirty minutes in traffic from South Kensington – with Joseph and all their luggage to deal with. A hard knot rises in her throat.

She taps the green button again and drums her fingers on the breakfast bar.

‘Rachel here. I’m probably teaching, napping, or ignoring my phone. Be brave – leave me a message.’

Amélie drops the phone with a clatter. Damn it, Rachel. Turn your bloody phone on.

She should’ve known better than to rely on anyone. Especially today. Why didn’t she book an Uber? But Rachel had insisted: I’m only round the corner – it’s no bother, happy to help.

And everything had come together so fast, there hadn’t been time to plan.

Back in the living room, Amélie glances at the suitcase and rucksack by the door. She picks up Joseph’s backpack and zips it shut. Then stands there, still, as the hum of traffic filters through the window.

What the hell am I doing, dragging my child to Wales to meet a man who vanished when I was six?

*

Amélie only has hazy memories of those first six years in the terraced house on Gwili Road, its windows looking down on Milford Haven docks.

From the fragments her mother shared, she pieced together the story: Trevor, a Welsh engineer on contract with Elf Aquitaine, met Delphine, a government translator, in Paris in the early 1980s. They married the next spring in Nancy, Delphine’s hometown – Trevor insisted it mattered to begin where she was from. When his contract ended, Delphine left behind her country, her language, and whatever past she had buried there, for a future in Wales. Trevor found work at a refinery, Delphine as a school secretary.

It began well enough. Within a year, Delphine was pregnant. She adored her husband, and Trevor adored Amélie. But after seven years of marriage, Delphine came home unexpectedly to find him in bed with a man named Alan.

The next morning, she grabbed Amélie by the hand and walked out of Trevor’s life without looking back.

*

‘Auntie Rachel!’ Joseph shouts, running from the window. ‘Mama, Auntie Rachel’s here!’

Amélie exhales in relief. A moment later comes a sharp rat-a-tat at the door – then in bursts Rachel, a whirlwind of skirts, smiles and kisses.

‘Hi Joey, hi Mel!’ She grins, pulling Joseph into her arms. ‘All set?’

Amélie doesn’t know whether to hug her or throttle her. ‘Where the hell have you been?’

‘Bit of a snarl-up on the A4,’ Rachel says, hauling the rucksack onto one shoulder with ease. ‘Don’t worry – we’ll be at Victoria in ten.’

Amélie throws up her hands. ‘Paddington, Rach. Not Victoria. Paddington!’

Rachel blinks. ‘Putain de merde! That’s miles further.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Right then. Come on, Joey – don’t forget Teddy Tistou!’

Amélie checks the locks, then hurries down two flights of stairs after them. Outside, the sky is the colour of old wool. Joseph and Rachel wait in a double-parked Mini, the engine running and the paintwork a mismatch of green and yellow panels.

‘Mama, why is the car sick?’ Joseph asks.

*

Delphine took Amélie to Tolworth in Surrey, where they lodged with a friend above a shop. She found work as a secretary at the Catholic school that took Amélie in, though she herself only went to Mass at Easter.

Amélie cried in the mornings and wet the bed at night. Sometimes her mother smacked her and called her father a dirty bastard; sometimes she wept when she thought Amélie was asleep.

But Amélie remembered a daddy who played Sinatra records and took her to football on Saturdays. After the match, they’d sit on the wall outside the chip shop, sharing hot chips, vinegar steam curling in the cold air.

*

‘Come on, Rachel, drive!’ Amélie pleads as Rachel turns into Brompton Road. She calls over her shoulder: ‘Joseph, have you got your seatbelt on?’

‘There isn’t one, Mama,’ he chirps from the back seat, where he is standing to show his teddy bear the view from the rear windscreen. ‘Yay, Teddy Tistou, we’re going on holiday!’

‘Oh for God’s sake, Rachel, this car is prehistoric.’

‘It’s a classic.’

‘A classic death-trap.’ Amélie twists in her seat and reaches back to catch Joseph’s arm. ‘Assieds-toi, Joseph. That’s very dangerous.’

‘Are you sure you’re doing the right thing?’ Rachel asks for the fifth time since Amélie told her about the trip.

Amélie laughs. ‘No, of course not. I told you, it’s just something I have to do. Now put your foot down.’

They are rattling along Knightsbridge Road, and Amélie feels sick – up ahead the lights at Hyde Park Corner are red, and the queue is at least twenty cars deep. She looks at her watch: 15.27. Twenty-one minutes to go.

*

After the divorce, Delphine bought a flat in Twickenham and life became settled. She took Amélie to ballet on Wednesdays, which she hated, and to French class on Saturdays, which she didn’t mind so much. Amélie still thought of her daddy, but she didn’t cry often. She was nine and hadn’t seen him in three years.

Delphine said Trevor didn’t care about her – but Amélie knew it was a lie. She knew because on her birthday, she found a card in their pigeonhole. It said:

To my darling girl, happy ninth birthday. Remember – you’re my Nancy with the laughing face. Love, Daddy xxx.

She cried with joy. ‘Nancy’ was the Sinatra song he used to sing her as a lullaby.

She never knew how he’d found the address – maybe the solicitor, maybe luck. She hid the card under her mattress and read it every night until Delphine found it and threw it on the fire.

‘Je te déteste!’ Amélie screamed. Delphine gripped her arm to stop her reaching into the flames.

As the paper curled and blackened, she buried her face in the hearthrug and wept.

*

The lights finally turn green and the Mini crawls onto Park Lane behind a tour bus.

‘Mama, I need a wee,’ Joseph pipes up.

Amélie groans. ‘I told you to go before we left.’

‘No you didn’t, and I really need a wee.’

‘You’ll have to wait, Joseph.’

He bangs his little fists on her seat. ‘But I need to go NOW.’

‘Auntie Rachel can’t stop on this busy road,’ Amélie says, as Rachel pulls into the middle lane to overtake the bus and nearly takes out a Deliveroo driver. ‘We’ll get squashed like grapes.’

‘Squashed like grapes, Teddy Tistou?’ Joseph squeals, scrunching the bear’s face in his hands. Then, he laughs so hard he forgets about needing a wee.

‘What time is it?’ Rachel asks. ‘The clock on the dash doesn’t work.’

‘Three thirty-three. Fancy driving to Wales?’

Rachel grins. ‘There’ll be another train tomorrow, you know.’

Amélie stares out the window. ‘Yeah. But I might not be brave enough to get that one.’

‘Just trust me, Mel – I told you I applied to be a black cabbie once?’

‘Yeah, and you failed the test.’

*

When Amélie was twelve, Delphine remarried and they moved to a flat in Hampton Wick. Her new husband, Michael, a retired banker twenty years older, tolerated Amélie more than he loved her. By then she was in year 8 at the grammar school, and Delphine had given up work to enjoy her new affluence. She began to mellow a little, but Trevor was never mentioned.

Amélie doubted her father knew where they lived, and any letters would have been destroyed. Once, after a row, she packed a bag, ready to run away to Pembrokeshire, but never made it past the garden gate. By sixteen she had stopped believing he wanted her. If he had, surely he would have found her. It was easier to think he’d given up than keep hoping.

*

They trundle past Marble Arch and head along Bayswater Road.

‘Three thirty-seven,’ Amélie says, grabbing her handbag from the footwell.

‘Less than a mile to go, babe,’ Rachel grins. ‘We’re burning rubber, baby!’

‘More like burning oil,’ Amélie mutters, rummaging through her bag. Suddenly, her stomach flips. ‘Shit – where’s my phone? The tickets are on there!’

*

As the years passed, Trevor faded deeper into memory. Still, now and then, something would pull him back. One afternoon, walking her spaniel, Tistou, along the towpath near Richmond Bridge, she passed a café tucked beneath the arches. A song drifted out through the open doors: If I don’t see her each day, I miss her…

It was enough. Her throat tightened. She sank onto a bench, clutching Tistou’s lead, and wept until a passing stranger gently asked if she was all right.

*

Amélie starts yanking things out: keys, purse, make-up. ‘I can’t find it!’

‘God, Mel, didn’t you check before we left?’

‘Of course I bloody checked! This trip is cursed. My mother’s haunting me.’

Rachel rolls her eyes. ‘It’s probably in one of the other bags. I’ll look.’ She leans into the back and unzips the rucksack one-handed.

‘For Christ’s sake, Rachel, watch the road!’

A lorry looms ahead. The Mini lurches to a halt, its bumper vanishing beneath the juggernaut’s tailgate. Amélie’s heart nearly stops.

Then, Joseph’s voice from the back seat: ‘Mama, look at this!’

She turns. He’s scrolling through photos on her phone.

She laughs, closes her eyes, and lets out a breath. ‘Oh, Joseph. Thank God.’

*

Michael died of a heart attack and Amélie got her A-level results. She had quietly applied to Université Paris Nanterre and was offered a place. Instead of being pleased, her mother called her a bitch and accused her of abandoning her, like everyone else.

‘Tu es la fille de ton père,’ she spat. Strangely, this didn’t hurt Amélie the way Delphine had intended. She’d always known she was her father’s daughter. Her petite frame and dark colouring contrasted sharply with Delphine’s height and auburn hair. In the mirror, she saw the same long nose and big teeth she remembered from her father’s face.

*

‘Westbourne Terrace, Mel. We’re almost there.’

As they swing into Sussex Gardens, Amélie looks at her phone. 15.42. ‘Come on, come on, come on,’ she says, lifting out of her seat. ‘Six minutes until the train goes without us.’

The Mini splutters onto Praed Street. The grand entrance arches of Paddington Station are just visible above the crowd.

‘Thank you, Jesus,’ Amélie says, raising her face to the ceiling.

‘You mean, “Thank you, Rachel, goddess of driving!”’

*

Out of guilt, she deferred her place, but after a year on the tills in Marks & Spencer she could bear no more of Delphine’s bitterness. She left for Paris under a cloud of reproach and moved into a flat up a spiral staircase in the 15th arrondissement with a French girl and a German boy. For the first time in her life, Amélie felt free. She never returned to Surrey – not even for holidays – though she emailed Delphine now and then. Her Richmond life felt far away. Her childhood with Trevor felt like something she had dreamed.

*

‘See, you should have had faith in me! Listen, I want you to WhatsApp me as soon as you get there, OK?’

‘Do mobiles work in Pembrokeshire?’ Amélie laughs.

‘Pfft. T’es trop snob! Seriously, Mel. Just do it. Promise me.’

‘Alright, alright, I promise. You’re a star, Rach – you know that, don’t you?’

Rachel blushes. ‘Shurrup, you silly cow.’

As they approach the drop-off point, Joseph presses his bear’s head against the car window. ‘Look, Teddy Tistou,’ he says. ‘That’s where Paddington Bear lives.’

*

She stayed in Paris for fifteen years. In her mid-thirties she had an affair with Jean-Luc, a charismatic lawyer. When she found herself pregnant, he offered to pay for a private abortion. She refused. Ten months later, she returned to England with her baby son, Joseph, in her arms.

Now in her sixties, Delphine wept upon meeting Joseph for the first time.

‘Mon petit-fils, mon beau petit-fils,’ she whispered, cradling the child and kissing his copper hair.

From that day on, Delphine doted on Joseph in a way she never had with Amélie. Amélie felt no resentment – only sadness for a lonely old widow whose bitterness had consumed her life.

*

Rachel jerks the Mini to a halt on the pavement outside the main entrance. Amélie jumps out and pushes forward her seat to haul her son and luggage out onto the road.

‘Quick Maman, quick!’ Joseph cries with excitement, dancing on the spot. Amélie teeters under the weight of the rucksack and heaves up the suitcase with both hands.

She hugs Rachel. ‘We love you.’

Rachel smiles. ‘I just hope you’re doing the right thing. I’ll be down there in a flash if he doesn’t treat you like a queen.’

‘You just want to hike the coast path.’

Rachel laughs. ‘Go!’

‘Come on, Joseph,’ Amélie says, taking his hand. ‘We’ve got to run now.’

*

Amélie moved back into her old home and took a teaching job at the Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle in South Kensington. On her first day, she met Rachel Rachilde, an art teacher who took her under her wing.

Delphine helped Amélie buy a flat near the school. It was more than she could ever have afforded on a teacher’s salary. But Delphine had insisted. She visited often when lockdowns permitted, and the two women discovered a fragile affection through their shared love of Joseph.

At sixty-three, Delphine died of liver cancer with Amélie at her bedside. Standing in the cemetery, clutching Joseph’s hand, Amélie felt the strange orphanhood of middle age—knowing her turn had come to stand at the front of the line.

*

‘Bye Mel, bye Joey,’ Rachel calls after them as they disappear into the station.

‘Love you, Rach,’ Amélie shouts back.

‘Bye, Auntie Rachel!’ Joseph calls, waving and blowing kisses.

*

Amélie felt a growing void as she watched Joseph turn from a toddler to a little boy. Images of herself at that age began to trickle back. Piece by piece, she rebuilt fragments of her early childhood from memories and dreams. One sultry night, she logged into Facebook and entered the words ‘Yolland’ and ‘Milford Haven’. After a moment, a single entry flashed up: ‘Marcus Yolland’. Another memory unlocked. A cousin. Fingers shaking, she typed:

Hi Marcus. This is your cousin, Amélie Yolland. I’m trying to reach my dad. I don’t even know if he’s alive. Please help.

*

Inside Paddington Station, the concourse is a blur of limbs and luggage. Amélie pulls Joseph behind her, suitcase wheels rattling across the tiles. She stops beneath the giant departures board, scanning for their platform.

15.48 to Carmarthen – Platform 4. She exhales.

Just then, she sees a little girl – around six, dark-haired – being tugged along by a mother in heels. The child glances up, dark eyes wide, and for half a second, Amélie sees herself. A small hand held too tight.

Joseph tugs her sleeve. ‘Mama, is it this way?’

She blinks, nods, and grips his hand.

*

Amélie and Joseph clamber onto the packed train right before the carriage doors close. Safely in their seats, Amélie sighs and presses her face against the cool glass as they begin to pull out from the station towards a past and a future.

Joseph sits with Teddy Tistou on his lap, and twists his mother’s dark hair around his fingers. ‘Where are we going again, Maman?’ he asks.

Amélie smiles. ‘I told you, ma puce. Somewhere very special.’

‘Maman, I am a rabbit, not a flea!’

She kisses his cheek. ‘You’re my little flea, Joseph. And a nice flea, because you don’t bite!’

Joseph giggles and pretends to nip her nose.

The train slips west through the city’s frayed edges – Acton, Ealing Broadway. The backs of terraces, power lines, weedy embankments flit past the window. Amélie exhales slowly. The pressure behind her eyes has eased, but her chest stays tight.

Joseph plays with Teddy Tistou for a while, making him leap between the seat backs, then moves on to a robot game, then her phone. He watches a cartoon with wide eyes, but soon slumps against her, warm and heavy. She strokes his red hair and watches the blur of towns she doesn’t know – houses, gardens, washing lines, whole lives unfolding behind windows.

Outside, the light is shifting. Reading. Swindon. Bristol. The train thins out – families, walkers, two city men talking about barbecue plans. Bank holiday. Even the timetable seems to have relaxed.

Her body stills, but her thoughts begin to drift.

She spent so long imagining Trevor as the lost hero who never stopped loving her. It was easier, maybe even necessary, to believe that. It protected her from her mother’s anger. From the chaos.

But that story wasn’t wholly true.

Delphine had left him for a good reason. He’d betrayed her – badly. Alone in a foreign town with a child, she’d discovered her husband in bed with a man.

She wonders now what it cost him, keeping that part of himself buried. In a refinery town, in the eighties. Maybe he didn’t even know, not fully. Or maybe he knew, and hoped it might go away with love and a child. For a while, maybe it did.

In Paris, she’d known men like that. Quiet, gentle men who’d spent their youth pretending. Who carried their secret like contraband until hiding it cost too much. She’d seen what silence could do to a person. How it hollowed them out.

Either way, he lied.

Humiliation layered on heartbreak. Of course she walked out. Of course she ran, dragging her daughter by the hand. And then, she slammed the door so hard it stayed shut for thirty-five years.

But still.

That betrayal was one moment. It didn’t erase the man who adored his daughter, who sent birthday cards she never saw, who cried when he heard her voice again.

Amélie sees that her mother couldn’t separate the love from the hurt. Trevor broke her, so he became only the one who broke her. It was the story she told for the rest of her life. And Amélie was the weapon she used to break him back.

For a long time, Amélie told her own story in return: of the father who vanished, the mother who burned.

But stories change. Or we finally stop needing to be the child in them.

Beyond Cardiff, the land opens up. The hedgerows fall away. The hills grow strange again, old and folded and wide. Fields scatter with sheep. The fences thin.

Joseph sleeps, one hand curled in the fabric of her coat.

She thinks of herself – young, furious, breaking free. She thinks of the mother she returned to after fifteen years of exile. The grandmother who held Joseph and wept. Who tried, in the end, to make amends. Who never quite said she was sorry, but found other ways to smooth the sharp edges.

She thinks of the man waiting at the end of the line.

She no longer needs him to be perfect. She just wants to see who he is. Who she is. That’s enough. But she doesn’t know what will come tumbling out when they meet, or how she’ll feel when it does.

She remembers his voice on the phone, shaking, broken by distance and years.

‘My darling girl,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d lost you forever. My Nancy.’

And how she wept – silent and stunned – because the voice was older now, slower, but still his.

The great grey steelworks of Neath and Port Talbot slip by. Swansea. Llanelli. Dusk creeps in as the train hugs the coast. A grey estuary slips past through salt marsh and rusting fences. They changed at Carmarthen, Joseph asleep in her arms, a kind woman helping with the bags. Now the train is smaller, quieter – only two carriages swaying westward through thinning hedgerows and scattered farms. Joseph twitches and murmurs something in French. She puts a hand on his head. He doesn’t wake. Whitland. Clynderwen. The train slows, the gaps widen, the world grows emptier and older. Her eyelids droop and she lets them, just for a moment. The gentle rock of the carriage, the child’s warm weight against her side, the breath of the fields – then the train gives a little shudder, and she lifts her head.

Haverfordwest. Johnston. Just a handful of passengers left now. Amélie shifts Joseph upright and gently pulls his coat around him. He stirs, murmurs, settles.

Finally, the train slows near a squat retail park with a Tesco and Boots behind chain-link fencing. Something in her chest tightens – there’s an open, brackish smell of sea and rust she hadn’t known she remembered.

Milford Haven.

The end of the line.

The brakes screech and the train sighs to a halt beside a concrete platform. No station – only a low shelter of scuffed perspex, a cracked tarmac verge, a portacabin, a single bin. A digital display flickers with the wrong time.

She lifts the suitcase, Joseph’s backpack, the rucksack, her half-asleep child.

Joseph blinks as she sets him down. ‘Where are we, Maman?’

She draws a breath. ‘We’re home, poppet.’

Outside, a man is waiting.

Elderly. White-haired. Slight and stooped, leaning on a stick. His fleece is zipped to the chin. In one hand, a bunch of supermarket flowers, the plastic rustling in the wind.

The long nose, the jawline, the slope of his shoulders – it’s all there. The face she’s always carried on her own.

Joseph moves beside her now, small and unsure. He grips the hem of her coat, peers past her hip.

‘Who’s that?’ he whispers.

Amélie rests a hand on his shoulder.

Her voice is quiet. Steady. ‘That,’ she says, ‘is someone very special.’

The carriage doors open and they step onto the platform, the train humming with heat behind them, the sulphur-sharp smell of the docks in the air. A gull wheels and cries above the estuary, its voice sharp and far away.

Trevor’s hand trembles on the stick. His mouth is tight, straining to hold back the tide. For a moment, Amélie is six years old again, waiting for her dad to bend forwards and scoop her into his arms.

Joseph looks at his grandfather, then back at his mother, and gently slips his hand into hers. Slowly, they walk towards him.

About the Author

John Barrett Lee is a Welsh writer of short fiction. His stories have been published on both sides of the Atlantic, and have been listed for various prizes, including the Historical Writers’ Association Dorothy Dunnett Award. His debut short story collection, Quiet Enough to Listen, was longlisted for the Cinnamon Press Literature Award. He has lived in Italy, Thailand, and Vietnam, and is now based in Ho Chi Minh City, where he works as an international school teacher.

Visit his website here, and find him on X at @johnbarrettlee.