Chapter 31
Eiley wasn’t ready to brave the long drive yet, so they took the train down to Glasgow the following weekend, which, in hindsight, wasn’t much easier.
Brook was hungry every five minutes and wanted something from the expensive trolley moving up and down the aisle.
Eiley had packed the wrong colouring book for Sky, and his cries had drawn the attention of the surrounding passengers, one old man even tutting at him in disgust. To top it all off, Eiley had wrestled with Saffron’s buggy from Fort William to Tulloch because the folding mechanism had stopped working.
She regretted her choices very, very much.
Especially when they got off the train to find Finlay waiting for them by the station’s entrance. He sported a big, lopsided grin, extending his arms out to the children. None of them ran towards him.
“Hello, Brook!” Finlay greeted.
Eiley was tempted to turn around. Sky and Saffron had always been an afterthought, likely because he assumed that Brook needed less effort as the oldest child. When Brook shifted behind Eiley’s leg, he focused his attention on Sky, who clung onto the bars of Saffron’s pram.
“Hello, little man! Have you missed your daddy?” He ruffled Sky’s hair, and Sky quailed.
“Sky doesn’t like to be touched,” Brook explained, because apparently her six-year-old was more intelligent than the man in front of her.
“Oh. I thought he’d have grown out of that by now.” Finlay frowned at Eiley. “You’ve let his hair get a bit long, haven’t you? He looks like a girl.”
She gritted her teeth. “He likes it that way.”
“He’s three. He doesn’t know what he likes.”
A deep breath. “He’s four , and I don’t think I can do this. Come on, lads.”
“No, no—” Finlay grabbed her quickly, forcing her to look at him. To stay. “You’ve only just got here. Please, give me a chance, aye? I’m just … I’m nervous, that’s all. We all are, aren’t we?”
Eiley had never felt more lost and more afraid than she did now, in a bustling train station of a city she barely knew.
She had no way of escaping quickly, no back-up if something went wrong.
She’d booked a hotel because she refused to stay the night in his house, but she hadn’t told him yet.
Worried that he might grip tighter if she did.
He must have sensed it, because he allowed Eiley to put distance between them. He squatted down to the kids, and there, something changed. His soft, adoring smile broke through as he tickled Saffron’s chin and earned a giggle.
This . This was all she’d wanted. Someone who loved them as much as she did.
“I’ve missed you, darling,” he whispered. “Do you remember your da, eh?”
“I don’t think she does,” Brook noted obliviously. “She’s only a baby.”
Finlay hid his discomfort, but Eiley still saw it in his tight lips. “Well, she can get to know me, can’t she? We all can. I have so much planned for you all this weekend, starting with ice cream!”
Brook perked up a wee bit, moving further out of Eiley’s shadow. When he looked up for her approval, she offered him a gentle nod, keeping him calm with a soothing hand on his shoulder.
“What flavour?” he asked.
“Whatever you’d like. I know a place that does hundreds of different ones!”
It was all it took for Brook to take his father’s hand, to walk through the station with him instead of her. She watched, wondering if it was right to be this wary. If she couldn’t trust Finlay to even know his children’s ages, should she truly be here?
It was too late to change her mind, so despite her trembling nerves, she pushed Saffron’s pram forward, Sky at her side.
When she longed for the feeling of safety, she tried not to wonder why it came to her in the memory of twinkling lights and tartan bedsheets, broad, scarred shoulders and gentle gasps – as though Warren and all of the ways he made her weak could ever offer more security than this.
They decided it better to begin with lunch before filling the kids’ tummies with ice cream. Well, Eiley did. Finlay pouted like one of them as he drove them to Queen’s Park, a gorgeous green space framed by the spires of the city.
“Here look okay?” he questioned, gesturing to a lacklustre cafe by the boating pond. It would have to do, because Brook had been complaining of hunger for the last several hours despite the snacks eaten on the journey.
The menu was small, although they offered children’s lunchboxes, thankfully with plain cheese sandwiches that Sky would enjoy.
“Still a picky eater, then?” Finlay joked when she ordered.
“If your question is whether he still struggles with certain foods, the answer is yes.”
Finlay grabbed his wallet before she could find her purse, giving her a soft smile. “On me, aye?”
She thanked him quietly. He’d paid for the train tickets, too, which had come as a surprise.
Fraser had dubbed him a stingy bastard, never chipping in on clothes or grocery shopping unless Eiley asked him to.
She didn’t feel she had a right to comment, being as he was the one who worked all day, even when he’d started lending out money to his mates.
Throwing his paycheck on drinks in the pub instead of coming home to spend time with them.
Then again, maybe she’d been impressed too soon. When his card swiped across the reader, the machine droned out a long beep, the one Eiley dreaded hearing in the bookstore because it meant the payment had been declined so she’d probably done something wrong.
Lines etched themselves into Finlay’s forehead as he tried again in vain.
“I’ll pay,” Eiley decided flatly, the machine reading her card perfectly the first time.
Finlay sniffed, jutting his chin out as though it hadn’t affected him. “Probably just have to check with my bank later.”
Eiley hummed in vague agreement, but this was nothing new for her. He’d owed thousands by the end of their relationship – but if he was no longer drinking, what was he spending that money on? This big house he’d bragged about? The one that was supposed to fix everything he’d broken?
She tried to give him the benefit of the doubt.
She wasn’t exactly rolling in cash herself.
But she was the one feeding three children.
Clothing them. Taking them to afterschool activities.
In spring, she’d paid forty pounds for Brook’s street dance classes only for him to decide after two lessons that he didn’t like it, despite having begged to go for months.
That mistrust lurked at the back of her mind. Maybe Finlay had lied about sobering up. Maybe he’d lost his job. Maybe this was an act.
The kids, at least, remained happy. After eating their sandwiches on the grass, they played hide and seek, leaving Eiley to pull her knees to her chest and take in the view of the algae-filled pond.
Her ham sandwich was left untouched, stomach too unsettled to even think about eating, though she hadn’t had breakfast, either.
Finlay smiled, then slid his phone out to glance at his screen. He frowned, but it was soon washed away when he realised he was being observed. “What do you think, then? It’s not a bad old city, eh?”
She shrugged. It wasn’t Belbarrow. Would Finlay cope with taking care of them alone, if they ever got that far? “It’s nice. Where are you working, now?”
“Just a leccy company over the river. Not a bad place. Pays better than freelance, anyway.” Back in Belbarrow, he’d worked for himself as an electrician, but like her brother, had found it difficult to find enough work in a small community.
Before that, he’d flitted between companies often, always finding a reason why it wasn’t the right fit.
Too many hours, spiteful bosses, his bad back, which never bothered him when he partied with mates all night.
“How long have you been there?”
Finlay squinted against the sunlight. “I feel like I’m in an interrogation.”
“Good. You should. You have a lot to prove.” She hugged her legs tighter, heart finally calming when she saw Brook and Sky tugging Saffron along to look at some pigeons on a nearby bench.
Happy. Only, how much did that really have to do with Finlay?
They could smile just as much in Mum’s back garden.
“I was let go from my last job a couple months ago,” he admitted. “But I got back on my feet quickly. Had to, to keep paying the bills.”
“And are you still paying them? Because …”
“Bloody hell, Eiley. Those card readers are always faulty. I told you I’ve got enough money to support them.”
But he wouldn’t meet her eye as he fidgeted with his wristwatch.
She didn’t believe him. Not one bit.
“Why’s Sky still not talking?” he demanded then.
She froze, the hair on the back of her neck rising.
“He’s still in speech therapy. He communicates in his own way.
” Recently, they’d been relying more on sign language, sometimes creating their own symbols to make it easier.
He’d already given her his symbol for home once today, when they’d nipped to the loo around the corner.
It had made her feel wobbly, wondering if she should give him what he wanted or try to ease him into this.
She was starting to wish she’d done the former.
Finlay said nothing, but she saw the displeasure curve on his lips all the same as he watched them play.
Sky jiggled and shook his head when Brook tried to throw fallen leaves over them, and Brook stopped.
Just like that. Because she’d made sure, before anything else, that the three of them knew how to listen to one another’s boundaries.
To care about one another. They squabbled like all siblings, but they also taught one another about unconditional love every single day, and it was her biggest source of pride.
“Go on. Tell me what you really think,” she bit out. “Tell me how to take care of our son properly, since you’re clearly so knowledgeable about it.”
“I just think you baby him too much, that’s all. He should be pushed to make more progress. He can’t be like this forever.”
“He’s autistic . It isn’t something you grow out of.”
“I know that, but there are lots of bairns with autism that can still speak and act normal.”
That word, normal , left her recoiling, nausea thickening her throat.
It had always been Finlay’s weapon: with Sky, yes, but also with her.
She wasn’t normal when she didn’t want to spend her weekends getting drunk at the pub with him.
She wasn’t normal when she felt anxious in busy spaces.
She wasn’t normal when, instead of having the magical postpartum glow they depicted on TV shows and social media, she’d sunk into the worst depression of her life, living in her pyjamas for months.
Even with Brook, Finlay hadn’t approved of his interest in theatre. He should play football or some other sport, like the strong lad he is.
It was bullshit, especially now, when Finlay didn’t have the slightest clue about anything regarding his children. Didn’t know when Saff had started walking, or what Sky’s first day at forest school had been like, or the name of Brook’s teacher.
Before Eiley could even formulate a reply, Finlay raised his hands cautiously. “I didn’t mean it that way. Don’t get upset, aye?” He looked around, as though more worried about what other people would think.
“I’m sorry.”
He wasn’t. She could tell. She could always tell.
And though it was wrong, visions of Warren in the fire truck with Sky littered her mind. Sky’s laughter. The careful ease with which Warren had kept his focus. He hadn’t worried about treating him like he was normal, because he’d known that he wasn’t . Normal didn’t exist.
Yet the man in front of her, who was half Sky’s, who shared his blood, just couldn’t get it.
“You won’t speak like that in front of them anymore,” she warned. “If you do, we’re gone. The only reason I’m not on my way home right now is because they’re happy, playing. The second that changes, Fin …”
Finlay picked at his bottom lip, ringed fingers gleaming in the light. “Understood. You call the shots now.”
She wasn’t done, still seething. “Get to know your kids before you tell me how to raise them.”
It wasn’t enough. He wasn’t enough.
She didn’t know why she’d ever expected that to change.