“I dare say none of this is convenient for anyone involved.”
He huffs a bitter laugh.
“I’m not asking you to be all right with this today. I’m not asking you to be generous or to move quickly through whatever you’re feeling. But I am asking you to let me be honest with you, because we’ve spent too many years not doing that and I’m not willing to keep doing it.”
He looks up at that. And I see it—the thing I’ve been watching for, the shift I wasn’t sure I’d ever get to witness. He goes very still in the way that is not his performing stillness but something underneath it, something younger and less managed.
I have rehearsed versions of this conversation in my head for years. Not the specifics but the general shape of it. The moment when I would finally say the thing I should have said long ago to my son, plainly and without the hedging that has made every previous attempt feel provisional. I have rehearsed it and lost my nerve and told myself there would be a better moment, andthe better moment kept not arriving because I kept not making it arrive.
I have spent years telling myself that the distance was his choice. That he was the one who kept it. That I extended invitations and he declined them, and that was the record of it, and I was not the primary architect of what we had failed to become. I believed that, for a long time, because it was more comfortable than the alternative.
The alternative is sitting with me now at twenty-six years old and three drinks in and raw in a way that only happens when a person has finally run out of reasons to stay armored. I am looking at him clearly, possibly for the first time, and I know the truth. The distance was mine. I built it. I maintained it with the quiet, efficient diligence of a man who was afraid of what getting it wrong would cost, and I got it wrong anyway, at a much higher price.
“The honest thing is that I should have been more present in your life. From the beginning. Your mother and I had an arrangement that suited her, and I told myself it suited you as well, and I was wrong. I should have pushed harder. I should have shown up in ways that mattered, and I didn’t, and I’m not going to ask you to minimize that because I can’t minimize it myself.”
He goes very still.
“I’m also not going to let it be the last word between us. You deserve better than a father who gives up, even if giving up is what I’ve been doing by degrees for twenty-six years.”
He looks, just for a moment, like the boy in the only photograph Cathryn ever sent me—standing at the edge of a beach with hisshoes in his hand, squinting into the sun, entirely unguarded. The definition of youth.
“I blamed myself,” he says. His voice is stripped of everything. “For Aoifa. I thought—if you hadn’t been on the phone to talk about me, if she hadn’t just found out?—”
“No.” I say it plainly, because softening it would undermine it. “That was not your fault. The phone call was not about you. It was about the affair that ultimately led to you, but it was not about you directly, Connor. You were not responsible for my choices or for what happened to Aoifa. That is mine to carry, Connor. Not yours. Do you understand me?”
He doesn’t answer immediately. The silence stretches. I let it. He needs this to settle in, and he’s drunk, so I am uncertain how long it’ll take, but I will give him all the time he needs for this to click. I’m not sure how long he has carried the burden of feeling this way, but his unnecessary guilt must end.
Then something gives way in him, and he leans forward, hands on his knees like they’re the last thing keeping him on his feet. His shoulders heave, and a wet sound comes from his chest.
I’m across the room before I’ve decided to move, and my son cries in my arms for the first time since he was born, and I hold him and say nothing at all, because there is nothing I could say that would be more useful than simply being here.
This. This is what I should have been doing all along. What I could have been doing. I could have been there for him, and I chose not to be.
No longer. From this day forward, I will be there for my son. In whatever ways he will let me be. I just pray he lets me in.
When he’s ready, he pulls back and drags a hand across his face, and I give him the room to reassemble himself without comment. Then, unexpectedly, he mutters, “She’s too good for both of us.”
The laugh that comes out of me surprises us both. “Probably.”
“She used to make this terrible green smoothie every morning,” he says, after a moment. “I don’t know what was in it. It smelled like a lawn mower had thrown up in her blender. Made my eyes water.”
“That bad?”
“Worse.” He almost smiles. “She’ll make you drink one eventually. If you stick around.”
“I have a strong constitution.”
“You’ll need it.”
23
SAGE
Leigh comes backthe next morning with pastries and an apology she has clearly been composing since before she arrived, because she launches into it the moment I open the door, before she’s even fully inside. “I need to tell you something,” she says, setting a paper bag on my counter without looking at me. “And I need you to let me get through all of it before you react, because I’ve been sitting on it for a while and it’s gotten heavier the longer I’ve held it.”
I look at her. Leigh, who has been my neighbor and best friend for three years, who I have never once seen nervous in my presence until recently, is nervous. She’s standing in my kitchen in her sweats with her Swiss Miss braids, and she will not quite meet my eyes.
Given everything else that’s happened lately, this is a new weird. I’m not sure I want a new weird. “Okay,” I say carefully. I sit down at the kitchen table. “Go.”
