Chapter 22 Ronan
RONAN
I am sitting in my study with a glass of Jameson I have not touched and a book I have not opened, doing the thing I’ve become embarrassingly fluent at lately, which is thinking about Sage, when someone hammers on my front door at nine forty-seven in the evening.
Some part of me knows exactly who it is. The same part of me that reminds me of my every failing as a father.
I set down the Jameson and go to the door.
Connor is in my hallway when I open the door.
He’s not sober, that much is clear. Enough that the edges of him are loose.
The armor he wears so consistently is slightly displaced, and what’s showing underneath is something I’ve been watching for across too many careful dinners and too-brief phone calls.
He looks, for the first time since he was small, like he needs his father.
“Come in,” I say.
He comes in and doesn’t sit. He moves around my sitting room with the restless, contained energy of someone with too much feeling and nowhere to put it. I sit in the armchair and let him move, because trying to contain Connor when he’s like this has never worked and I learned that lesson years ago.
“She told me to go find my own life,” he says. Not quite to me. To the room.
“That sounds like her.”
He looks at me sharply. “You don’t know her.”
“Not yet. But from what I’ve seen, she says the true thing directly. I expect that’s part of what you liked about her, particularly given your career field. That’s part of what makes this harder.”
He stops moving. He stands in the middle of my sitting room and the flat, armored expression I know so well cracks slightly at the edges. Underneath it is something raw and young, and it does something to my chest that I don’t have a word for.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” he asks. “On the phone. When I told you about her. You just listened, and you didn’t say a word.”
“I didn’t know who she was to you,” I say. “You never said her name to me, so I thought she was yet another girl you dated, but didn’t connect to. I didn’t know who she was to you until the day after the kids were born.”
The silence that follows is long and specific until he breaks it. “This is fucked.”
“In some regards, yes.”
He sits. Heavily, in the way of someone whose legs have made a decision ahead of the rest of him. He puts his elbows on his knees and looks at the floor, and I give it space to land because this is the kind of information that needs to settle before a person can respond to it usefully.
“So the whole time,” he says. “The whole pregnancy. She knew, and she didn’t say anything.”
“She didn’t know who I was to you either. Not until the same day I knew.” I keep my voice steady. “Neither of us was keeping a secret, Connor. We didn’t have the information.”
“Convenient.”
“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, and the 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 his shoes 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.”