She opens another box and sighs.“This is absurd.”
Callum crouches nearby, resting his forearms on his knees.“What is?”
“Receipts.Storage invoices.Repairs from twenty years ago.”She flips through the papers, irritation sharp in every movement.“Why bring this up here?Why hide it?”
“Keir didn’t hide things because they were valuable,” Callum says.“He hid them because they were a part of him.”
She shoots him a look.“That’s not comforting.”
“It’s not meant to be.”
She snorts softly, then reaches deeper into the box.Her fingers still.
Callum feels the shift instantly.Her breath catches, not sharply, but like something inside her has gone rigid.
“What?”he asks.
She doesn’t answer at first.Slowly, she pulls out a folded sheet of paper.Thicker than the rest.Official.
She opens it.
Callum leans in, scanning automatically.Header.Date.Clinic name.
Then the word.
VASECTOMY
His stomach drops.A week after her birth.
Isla stares at the paper like it’s written in another language.“That’s not possible.”
Callum swallows.“It is.”
Her head snaps up.“Why would he do that?”
The question slices through the room, sharp and demanding.Not grief yet.Anger.The kind that wants a reason, it can tear apart.
Callum can’t answer.Because everything he knows about Keir suddenly feels… insufficient.
She presses the paper toward him.“Why?”
“I don’t think it was about not wanting a child,” he says slowly.
Her laugh is harsh.“That’s exactly what it looks like.”
“It looks like a man closing a door,” Callum says.“But not necessarily because he didn’t want what was on the other side.”
“That’s generous,” Isla snaps.
“I’m not trying to be generous.”
“Then be honest.”Her voice tightens.“Why would he take a permanent step like this?”
Callum exhales, long and controlled.“Because Keir often said he believed he ruined people.”
Isla’s anger stutters, but only for a moment.“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I have,” he says.“He talked about failure like it was inevitable.Like once you crossed a certain line, all you could do was make things worse.”
