After the End: Book 4

33. Drunk Resolutions

Louis POV

The story goes that my mum met Paulie Hiddleston when she was almost 19. He was 21 and recently had started his career in sales. He traveled a lot. They dated for 6 months, and then my mum found out she was pregnant with me. Oops.

She told Paulie and he immediately bolted. It was apparently very straightforward. He told her not to keep the baby, she told him no and they went their separate ways. They quite literally never spoke again, and she was left to assume he never had any interest.

When she was about 3 months in, she took a trip to the beach with some friends. It was like a final vacation before she was going to be forced to get her life in order for my impending arrival. It was on this trip that she met Mark Tomlinson, the man I actually called my father. He was older and more sophisticated. He worked in something finance related that I never understood. She was smitten. It was described to me as a whirlwind romance. She said she was instantly in love and he knew her situation and he didn't seem to care. Then she went home and they didn't speak to eachother for weeks. She thought it was like a vacation fling type thing, but she was gutted.

Then Mark showed up at her mums house and proposed instantly. He agreed to take care of her and her baby based on two weeks spent together at the beach. My mum said yes, moved with him to Doncaster, and I was his son. It was just decided.

He kept his promises. We were housed. Mum was able to finish school and become the nurse she always wanted to be. I got to have a father figure.

Unfortunately Marks passions seemed to be dampened by parenthood. He wasn't as romantic or as emotional as he'd been at the beach according to my mum, but he was a stable guy and he cared for the basic needs of her family so she couldn't complain. She'd been a pregnant teenager after all. In her eyes, Mark had swooped in and saved us.

14 years later Paulie died. He had a slow burning cancer that had caught him a little bit by surprise. In his final days, he seemed to have some regrets, and so he called up his attorney, adjusted his will, and left a written apology to my mum for his abandonment alongside a chunk of money for good measure. It was delivered to her within a week of his passing.

Mark took intense offense to it, but what really put the nail in the coffin was when I found out. Things hadn't been great already and the house had been plagued in conflict constantly, but when I found out he wasn't my real dad, something in Marks ego shattered. He left within a few days and never came back. He barely contacted us, although I knew my mum and him shared a handful of phone calls that year. Eventually things tapered and he was presumed dead to us. We knew he was alive, but he wasn't our concern. He was a nobody.

The only time my mum and I ever talked about it together was when Naomi first told me about Oliver. Paulie had died of a cancer. I wanted to know if it was genetic. I ended up swabbing my mouth for some family genetic testing thing and my mum and I had read results together. It all came back very boring, but it gave me peace of mind.

Then my mum had died. I thought maybe Mark might show up for the funeral, but he didn't. I was thankful for that. I really thought I'd gotten lucky and he wouldn't show up anywhere, but then the postcard arrived at my lawyers office. My father had sent me his contact information with a note informing me that out of respect for our history he would not be using legal routes or courts to establish custody or visitation of his girls, but that he wanted me to call him. My mum had just died and Harry had just left and I was a mess. Everything was a disaster and  I couldn't handle it. I shredded the card. It didn't matter because I'd memorized his phone number on sight, but things had been so blurry and so frazzled at the time that I'd just convinced myself the entire thing had been one in a string of nightmares keeping me up at night.