Chapter 2
T he weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas passed like a film in fast-forward for Oona.
She kept wishing that she could stop the film to catch her breath.
She knew that Charles was still in the city, and going to work at HRK, while living with Roberto.
She kept having to remind herself that he was leaving her, already had, leaving his job at the end of the year on sabbatical, and leaving the country in five weeks.
He never called her to see how she was.
He had walked out of her life and into Roberto’s. She saw that he put the same amount he always did in her household account, he even added a little extra, but in every other way, he had removed himself. It was almost as if he had died, and Oona was mourning the loss of their marriage.
Since the children knew nothing about it yet, she had to remind herself not to let anything slip when she spoke to them.
Will was busy with his job at Google and his girlfriend, and less aware of nuances when speaking to his mother, which he didn’t do often.
He called every week or two, and otherwise sent her texts.
Meghan called more often and was more likely to hear something in her mother’s voice.
Oona had to make sure she sounded “up”
when she spoke to her and didn’t give any sign of how devastated she felt.
Oona felt as though the bottom had dropped out of her world.
She kept asking herself if it was her fault.
Had she failed as a wife? If she had tried harder, been less involved with her job, or been more aggressive sexually, would he still have fallen for Roberto? Or was she fighting something in his DNA that would have surfaced sooner or later? You didn’t just change sexual orientation because your wife was busy at work, or didn’t feel sexy after a long day at the office or taking care of the kids when they were still at home.
There had been plenty of occasions, particularly on weekends, when she would have been willing and had tried to initiate sex with him, but he wasn’t in the mood or was stressed over client presentations that hadn’t gone well.
She was willing to admit that she hadn’t been the perfect wife, and their bond had never been one of passion, but it still didn’t explain Roberto and the fact that Charles admitted that he was in love with him.
He seemed as startled by it as Oona was, but he was willing to leave an entire world for him and start a whole new life.
In some ways it was easier that he would be exploring the relationship a continent away.
She didn’t have to worry about running into him, or others discovering it before she felt able to face them, if they mentioned it to her.
But it also meant that there would be no chance to see him, to have coffee or a glass of wine, and try to figure out with him what had happened for him to make such a radical change in his life.
He was going to be completely removed, living in Buenos Aires.
It sounded sexy and romantic to her.
She had no idea how to compete with it and knew she couldn’t.
She felt as though she had lost him from the moment he’d told her about it, when in fact she had lost him months before.
It made her feel unattractive as a woman, and frightened of the future.
She had her job and some of the money her mother had left her, which she had invested carefully when her mother died, but there wasn’t much left nearly thirty years later.
She was financially dependent on Charles, who had more money than she did, from his family, the trust they had set up for him and his brothers, and his job.
He earned more than she did.
She was sure he would provide for her.
But what if he decided to stay in South America and give up his job? He was close enough to retirement age that he might opt for that, or maybe he would transfer to the HRK office in Buenos Aires where Roberto worked.
She might never see him again after he left.
And what if something happened to her or she got sick? She had always assumed Charles would be there, and now he wouldn’t.
Who would be? Her children were young and busy and lived in other cities.
She would be all alone now, and Charles would be with Roberto.
It made her feel panicked. She had no idea what Charles’s plans were, since he didn’t know them himself. But she felt as though she was standing on shifting sands, emotionally and financially, which was the reality she had to face now.
They had sworn to each other years before that they would never get divorced.
Whatever happened, they would work it out, for their children’s sake and their own.
Neither of them wanted to be divorced.
What had happened to that? He seemed to have forgotten it entirely.
And how could she ever take him back now, if he decided Roberto wasn’t his future after all, and only a time-out? It would be a lot to ask of her, after everything he was changing now.
She couldn’t see the future at all anymore. All she saw ahead of her was a thick fog enveloping everything that had been their life.
She was so profoundly shocked she wasn’t even sure she missed him.
He emailed and texted her a few times to see how she was, but he didn’t call.
And what was she supposed to say? That she was fine? And everything was great? She could hardly concentrate on her work, and she couldn’t sleep at night.
She lay awake every night worrying about the future, and examining the past, like a film she kept running to see where the initial flaw was, what mistake she had made that had caused their life to go off the rails.
She didn’t know what she could have done differently.
She thought of all the weekends when she had worn old sweaters and torn jeans, when she didn’t wear makeup and barely combed her hair.
It was a relief on the weekend not to make the effort, but even she realized that it took more than ratty sweaters and twenty-five years of bad hair days to make your husband fall in love with a man.
She was worried too about how her children would react.
She wondered if they would be sympathetic to him, or furious and feel betrayed.
She wasn’t sure how she felt, let alone able to predict how her children would feel, and they would have little time to adjust.
By the time Charles told them during the Christmas holidays, he would be leaving for Buenos Aires in a week.
Oona thought his timing was a mistake, but he insisted that he didn’t want to ruin Christmas for them.
He wanted to leave them their illusions until after Christmas Day.
The holidays seemed irrelevant to her now, and she suspected they would to Will and Meghan as well.
Like the house she had rented for their anniversary, it was the last thing on her mind.
She had already paid for it so she couldn’t back out.
There was no cancellation policy that applied.
There hadn’t been an earthquake that caused the house to fall down, a flood that had washed it away, a war that would stop them from coming, or a terminal illness in her family.
It felt as though her life had been hit by a bomb, but nothing that would convince the owners of the house in France to return her money. She didn’t even try. And she didn’t have the energy for a fight.
Oona continued going to conferences at the office, completing year-end reports, and meeting with authors.
She countersigned contracts for one of the firm’s major authors.
She went through the motions of everything she had to do, but there was a feeling of unreality about everything she touched.
She barely ate at night when she went home.
It was as though all the color had gone out of her life when Charles moved out, and her life had suddenly switched to black and white.
He wasn’t an exciting person and never had been. But he had been solid and steady, and she had always known that she could count on him. And now she couldn’t anymore.
He suddenly belonged to someone else, and the only role she had was of the wife he didn’t want. He tried to explain to her by email that he still loved her, but she found that impossible to believe now.
She didn’t call anyone or tell a friend.
It was so huge that she couldn’t find the words or the courage to explain it to someone else and didn’t want to.
She needed time to herself to get used to the idea.
She didn’t tell anyone at work what had happened.
She made it a policy not to talk about her personal life, and her separation was beyond the scope of the relationships she had at work.
She was on good terms with all of her employees, and with her superiors in the parent company, but Charles had been her confidant and best friend, and it was too humiliating to tell anyone what had happened.
She wondered what he had told his brothers. She asked right after he moved out and he said he hadn’t told them yet. She wondered if he would. They were very conservative, traditional people.
She couldn’t imagine them being warm and supportive of the changes he was making in his life. Oona had never felt close to them. They had always treated her as an appendage of Charles, not a separate person. She had no deep relationship with them.
With their obsession about money, they had never been impressed with her genteel intellectual job, running a tiny imprint of a bigger house.
It wasn’t something they understood, and they openly disapproved of Meghan’s aspirations to work for a foundation in Africa and thought she should get a “real”
job.
Will’s position at Google was more understandable.
Oona had no family of her own, as the only child of only children who had died young.
She had no living relatives except her children and Charles, and she felt the lack of an adult support system now.
She was close to one of her colleagues at Hargrove Publishing, who ran a division of the company focused on self-help books and nonfiction, but she was too ashamed of what had happened to talk to her about it, or it was too soon.
She wasn’t ready to discuss with anyone the fact that Charles had left her, let alone for a man.
She felt like an epic failure as a wife.
It was hard to see it any other way, and she wasn’t willing to demonize Charles. It wasn’t his fault if it turned out now that he was gay.
She just wished he had come to the realization earlier, or maybe it was better that he hadn’t. At least Meghan and Will had had a traditional father until they were adults.
She wondered if they were of a generation that would fully accept his change of heart.
She knew that many of their friends accepted homosexuality as just one variety of the norm, but she wasn’t sure if that included, or would include, their father as part of that trend.
She vaguely remembered it happening to one of their friends in high school, and she knew some of their friends were gay, but she suspected that his leaving New York and his job too would compound the issue in their eyes.
She was afraid they would view it as an abandonment, which was what it felt like to her. Wherever Charles chose to live now, her life had flipped over entirely. No matter what Charles said about not being sure, and needing to “figure it out,”
Oona knew that they could never put their marriage back together after something like this.
It was over for them, and she was trying to adjust to the idea.
She was still struggling with it when he dropped a suitcase off the morning that Will was due back in New York, and Meghan was coming up from Washington by train, three days before Christmas.
Oona told him to leave his bag in the guest room, and Charles looked surprised.
“How are we going to explain that to the kids?”
She thought he looked pathetic when she answered him.
Occasionally she wondered if he had lost his mind.
“We can tell them you’re in the middle of a big international deal and getting calls from all over the world at all hours, and you don’t want to wake me,”
she said with an irritated expression.
“You didn’t think you were going to sleep in our room, did you?”
she asked him.
“I didn’t know what you’d want to say to the kids.”
He looked sheepish.
It was an awkward situation for both of them, and he felt guilty just being there, but he wanted to spend the holiday with his kids.
Roberto was spending Christmas with friends in Connecticut, and he understood that Charles needed this time with his family, so he could explain things to his children.
He didn’t consider Oona a threat.
Charles had told him that he hadn’t been in love with her for years, and Roberto believed him.
It had the ring of truth.
“When are you planning to tell them?”
she asked him.
She wanted to be on hand to pick up the pieces afterward, but not be present when he told them.
She had already made that clear.
He’d had his last day in the office two days before, and he’d be working from the Buenos Aires office three or four days a week.
“The morning after Christmas,”
he said solemnly.
Oona wondered if it was worth the charade before that.
It was going to be a Christmas they would always remember whatever day he did it, and they weren’t children anymore.
The holiday would be ruined for them as soon as he told them his big news and his plans.
“I’m late for a meeting,”
she said, and left for the office a few minutes later.
They had their big office Christmas party that day, and she put a good face on it for her staff.
She was standing alone for a few minutes, surveying the group, when her friend Gail Baldwin came over and stood next to her.
“Where’ve you been hiding out? I haven’t seen you in weeks.”
“I’ve been here, just busy with year-end reports.”
“I haven’t finished mine yet,”
Gail said with a groan.
She was five years older than Oona but looked considerably older with short gray hair and a lined face.
She’d been divorced for twenty years and didn’t have kids.
The division she ran at Hargrove was bigger and more stressful than Oona’s lofty elite world of literary authors.
They had talent, but were not big moneymakers for the house, selling in small quantities.
Gail’s authors wrote nonfiction and self-help, which were more commercially viable, and it was an important division. Gail claimed that most of them were crazy, and vegans. “Are you okay?”
she asked Oona.
She knew her well and something seemed off to her.
Oona looked thin and pale, with a distracted expression, and a vague look in her eyes.
“Yeah, pretty much.”
But Gail could tell she was lying and didn’t want to press her.
She seemed tired and stressed, usually Oona was much more cheerful.
She loved her job and the books that they published.
“The kids okay?”
“They’re great, coming home tonight.”
She usually looked happier when she said it.
Oona wasn’t ready to tell her about the separation yet.
She didn’t want to deal with people’s reactions, even Gail’s, especially their sympathy about a possible divorce, which seemed inevitable to Oona.
“What are you doing for Christmas?”
“I’m spending it with my mother in Vermont.
My brother and sister couldn’t do it this year, so it’s my turn.
Have you heard the rumors around the office by the way?”
Gail always knew the inside dirt before anyone else did.
Usually Oona was more interested, but today she wasn’t.
Her own news was more than enough for now, but she pretended to be interested so as not to disappoint Gail.
“It hasn’t been confirmed yet, but apparently, we’re buying Shipsted and Breck.
They haven’t closed the deal yet, but they’re close.
I heard it from Marty’s assistant. She would know, she knows everything that happens up there.”
Martin Grass was the CEO.
Gail had myriad sources and kept her ear to the ground.
She loved knowing all the gossip first and was a great source for Oona.
“What will that mean for us?”
Oona asked, mildly concerned.
“Nothing for you.
Your imprint is the Great Untouchable, it’s iconic, you provide the literary decorum around here.
I’m out here among the masses with cookbooks and how to survive menopause.”
“There’s a need for both,”
Oona reassured her with a tired smile.
She still wasn’t sleeping since Charles had moved out, and she was exhausted, almost too much so to worry about the acquisition of another house, which normally would have been of great interest to her.
“We haven’t had a big hit in a while.
We lost the auction on the last one.
I guess they were saving their money to buy S and B.
It could mean that about half of us get fired, if it goes through,”
Gail said.
“Terrific.
Merry Christmas to you too.
And I’m no safer than you are.
We probably make less on all my books than one of yours on do-it-yourself carpentry and how to build your own deck.”
“You give us class and literary dignity.
Most of my authors write one book and they’re done, and if they have a big one, their next one is a flop.
What comes after solar panels and a guide to total hip replacement? Or the gourmet side of vegan cuisine?”
Gail had no pretensions about the books she published, but she chose them well, they sold incredibly, and they stayed on the bestseller lists for months.
“You’ve been here longer than anyone else, and you know nonfiction better than anyone in the house,”
Oona said with a smile.
“That’s no guarantee of safe passage these days.
It’s all about the bottom line.
You’ve got a string of high-end literary successes that win awards to show them.
Mine come and go like the wind.
It’s going to make everyone nervous, that’s for sure.
They’ll have about twice as many people as they need, so heads will be rolling if it goes through.”
“When will they know?”
It was one more thing to worry about, and Charles’s departure was enough for the moment.
“I think they’re going to announce it in January, from what Chrystal says.
Heads won’t start rolling until the spring.
But you’ll be fine,”
Gail said again.
Two of their coworkers joined them then, they changed the subject, and Oona left half an hour later.
She wanted to get home before the kids.
She gave Gail a hug and wished her a merry Christmas, and they promised to have lunch to catch up when Gail got back from Vermont.
Oona could tell her about the separation then, if she felt up to it.
It would seem more real after Charles left New York. For now, it still felt like a bad dream she’d had and would wake up from. But there was no waking up from the reality of Charles being in love with Roberto.
Meghan arrived at their building in the East Seventies by cab, just as Oona’s pulled up.
She was struggling to get her suitcases, two tennis rackets, some cartons, and a guitar out of the cab, and the doorman and her mother helped her.
She had emptied her apartment in Washington and was moving home until she found a job.
“I should have rented a van and driven home,”
Meghan said, as Oona grabbed the tennis rackets and the guitar, and they got all of it into the elevator and went upstairs.
Charles helped them when they got into the apartment and looked happy to see his daughter.
And she was happy to see him.
He helped carry her suitcases to her room, which led them past the guest room, and she commented as she walked by.
The door was open and she saw the suitcase standing next to the bed.
“Who’s staying in the guest room?”
she asked.
“I am, we’re closing a deal with a big new client in Europe, and I have to be available by phone at all hours, and your mother didn’t want me keeping her up all night,”
Charles said.
“Cool,”
Meghan said, as he set down her bag in her room, and she looked around, happy to be home, and then they both went into the kitchen, where Oona was organizing dinner.
Will arrived half an hour later and the apartment felt full and happy and alive.
They all admired the Christmas tree Oona had set up in the living room and decorated with a heavy heart.
She hated pretending to Will and Meghan that everything was normal, when it wasn’t, but it was the way Charles wanted to do it, and she acceded to his wishes, although she could guess that the children would object to having been lied to, but he would have to deal with it when he told them.
This was his show now, and she would be there to console them after he left.
Dinner went smoothly that night, Will and Meghan were happy to be home, and their parents were delighted to see them.
They all went to their rooms after dinner, the kids to call their friends, Oona to try to relax in the awkward situation, and Charles to the guest room, supposedly to answer emails.
The next day, they all had errands to do, the kids had friends to see and last-minute Christmas gifts to buy, and that night both Will and Meghan went out, since the next day was Christmas Eve and they’d be together.
Oona did her best to avoid Charles and stayed in her room most of the time, and Charles was putting on a convincing act of being jovial with the kids.
Oona had a splitting headache that night and went to bed.
Their usual caterers made Christmas Eve dinner, and they went to midnight mass afterward as they always did.
Instead of putting on Christmas carols and sitting in the living room with the tree lit after mass, Oona made a discreet exit to her room, leaving Charles to hang out with the kids in the kitchen.
Meghan stopped in to see her mother on the way to her room to go to bed.
“Are you awake?”
she whispered from the door, and Oona smiled at her from the bed.
The lights were still on.
“You okay, Mom?”
She nodded, but the lies and forced gaiety were getting to her.
“I’m just tired, it’s been a long week at work.”
Meghan nodded and went to bed a few minutes later, stopping in to see her brother on the way to her room.
He was talking to his girlfriend in California, so Meghan left, and had the gnawing impression that something was wrong, but clearly whatever it was her mother didn’t want to talk about it.
She wondered if her parents had had a fight.
But Christmas Day seemed almost normal.
Oona and Charles played their parts well, everyone loved their gifts, the meal was delicious, and they all went to bed early that night.
The next morning, Oona made a point of getting in and out of the kitchen early and went back to her room with a cup of coffee, intending to stay there while Charles spoke to Meghan and Will after breakfast.
When they both showed up in the kitchen, he had coffee and cinnamon buns ready for them, and they smelled delicious.
“Where’s Mom?”
Meghan asked.
Oona usually made them waffles the morning after Christmas, and there was no sign of her.
“Is she sick? She looked really tired last night.”
Their father was quiet for a minute, and decided that it was time to dive in.
He couldn’t put it off any longer.
He told them about Roberto, and that he had had to make a hard decision.
He knew it would be startling news to them, but he hoped for their support.
Then he told them that he was taking a sabbatical, while working part-time from the agency’s office in Buenos Aires, and he planned to be there for six months.
There was dead silence in the kitchen after he said it, and Charles felt sick when he saw that Will was crying.
“You’re leaving ?”
Meghan said with a look of disbelief.
“After you tell us you’re gay, and you’re having a relationship with a man.
Are you divorcing Mom?”
She was too hurt and angry to even cry, and Will hadn’t said a word.
He wiped his eyes on his sleeve and waited for his father’s answer.
“No, your mom has very kindly agreed to wait while I’m gone, and we’ll see where things stand when I get back.
She’s been amazing about it.”
“Have you looked at her lately, Dad? She looks terrible, she looks sick and like she’s lost ten pounds since Thanksgiving,”
and now Meghan knew why.
“Why are you leaving now?”
She didn’t even address the stunning news that he was gay.
His imminent departure for six months seemed more pressing.
The rest could wait.
“Because Roberto’s visa is expiring and we want to be together to figure things out,”
he said, and it sounded weak even to him.
“Who do you care about, Dad? Some guy you’re having sex with, or your wife and kids? You owe Mom more than that.
And what about us? Are you going to come back and see us?”
Meghan was holding his feet to the fire.
“You can come and see us whenever you want,”
he said.
“I’d like you to meet him, before we go.”
Will silently shook his head with a dark look at his father and Meghan spoke for them both.
“I don’t want to meet him.
This isn’t about him, it’s about us.
You’re just walking out on everything.
Mom, us, your job, your marriage.
You’re nearly sixty years old.
How can you suddenly decide you’re gay now?”
All the cards were on the table, and Meghan didn’t like the hand they’d been dealt.
She was losing respect for him by the minute, not for his sexual orientation, which came as a surprise to all of them, but for the way he was handling his exit, running off to South America with his boyfriend.
It was the most selfish thing she’d ever heard.
“Don’t you think you owe it to us to stick around, at least for Mom? You just made a huge announcement that you’re gay, and now you’re leaving ?”
“Your mom understands the situation, and it will be better for us to be apart.
And I need some time off from my job while I make this adjustment.
I can handle some of it from Buenos Aires, and they’ll have to manage the rest without me.
After ten years with the firm, I’m entitled to a sabbatical.
It’s in my contract,”
he said defensively.
“Will is in San Francisco, and you want to go to Africa as soon as you find a job you like.
My staying in New York won’t change anything for you.”
“No, but maybe it would for Mom.
What is she supposed to do now while you ‘figure out your life with Alberto,’ or whatever his name is.”
She sounded strident as she confronted him, and it was painful but he knew he had to endure it.
He hadn’t expected her to be as angry as she was.
She was livid on behalf of her mother, herself, and her brother.
“His name is Roberto.
I offered her a divorce if she wants one.
She doesn’t.”
“She’s probably too shocked to know what she wants,”
Meghan guessed accurately.
“We can figure all that out later.
Roberto will get his visa back in six months.
We’ll come back to New York then.”
“And what is she going to tell people in the meantime?”
“That’s up to her,”
he said quietly.
“This is hard for both of us.
We’re your parents and we love you, but we both have a right to be happy.
This is what I need to be happy right now.
I’m older than your mother, and I have a right to happiness in my life before I’m too old to enjoy it,”
he said, trying to convince her.
“How old is he?”
she asked him.
He hadn’t told them yet.
She didn’t want to sound critical of his being gay, but Will looked devastated.
“He’s thirty-four, and a very responsible person.
We didn’t set out to destroy this family.
It’s a hard situation for all of us.”
“It sure is,”
she said, glancing at her brother.
“You’re going off in pursuit of your happiness, and you’re leaving Mom here to deal with it alone.”
He couldn’t deny it and didn’t answer her.
Will looked at him as though his best friend had just died.
“Did you always know you were gay, Dad?”
Will asked him, all his illusions about his father shattered.
“No, son, I didn’t.
I knew it after I began to care for Roberto.
I couldn’t stop it.
I knew then that I couldn’t stay with your mom and be dishonest with her about it.
I’ve been wrestling with this for a little over a year.
The last thing I wanted to do was hurt her, or either of you, but it is what it is. I think it’s something that has lain dormant in me for a long time. I know what I’m doing is right.”
“For you ,”
Meghan said angrily, “not for the rest of us.
You couldn’t just stick with what you were doing for the rest of your life? Why do you have to make this enormous change now?”
“I can’t lie about who I am,”
Charles said firmly.
“Your mom is younger than I am.
If this is the way things work out, she can meet someone else.”
He made it sound so simple, but it wasn’t.
“That’s up to me to decide, not you,”
Oona said in a strong voice.
She had walked into the kitchen, and they hadn’t seen her.
“So I guess you both know what’s happening now.
And I want to tell you both that I’ll be fine,”
she said, looking at her son and daughter.
“I’m as sad about it as you are, but if this is what has to be, and what your father needs, we’ll all get through it, and be okay.
Sometimes you just can’t stop the way destiny works out.
We love each other,”
she said to her children, not her husband, “and I know your dad loves you too, even if it doesn’t feel that way right now.
There are two issues here.
The first is what he’s discovered about himself.
That we have to respect.
He didn’t choose it, he found out something important about himself that he couldn’t ignore.
And the other issue is his going to Argentina for six months. He had a choice about that, but not about his sexual orientation.”
“I think it’s disgusting that you’re just dumping us and going to Argentina,”
Meghan said to him directly.
She had voiced her feelings throughout the conversation with him.
Will still hadn’t spoken.
He was deathly pale, and tears kept springing to his eyes faster than he could wipe them away.
“Six months isn’t a long time,”
Charles said softly.
“I need this time to find myself,”
he said.
“And you’ll both be busy and away.
It’s up to your mom and me to figure out what to do about our marriage and when.”
“I’d still like to go to France with both of you, the way we planned,”
Oona said to her children.
“We have the house for a month, we might as well use it,”
she said sadly.
“And it’ll be good for us to get away after all this upheaval.”
“I can’t take a month off,”
Will responded immediately.
“I asked for a week.
I can stay for ten days, and then I have to get back.”
“I won’t know until I find a job,”
Meghan added.
“But you can stay in France if you want to, Mom.
I’ll stay as long as I can.”
She wanted to be there for her mother now.
She thought that what her father was doing, just walking out and leaving with his new love for six months, was despicable, and would have been even if it was a woman.
It was all about him.
She wondered if he had always been that way and their mother had covered for him.
He wasn’t even apologetic about leaving.
He was defensive about it and fighting for his own happiness, regardless of how they or their mother felt.
Will stood up then and said he had to meet a friend.
He grabbed a tissue and blew his nose.
He looked at his father.
“Will we see you again before you go?”
“I’m going to leave the apartment now, and I’ll come back to say goodbye to both of you, and if you need to talk before that, you can call me.
I’m here for you until I leave.
I’m in New York for another six days.
Roberto’s visa expires on January second.”
They both nodded their understanding, and Will left the room to get his jacket and was back a minute later and looked at his mother.
“Can I bring Heather to France, Mom? I’d really like to.”
She nodded without hesitating.
She knew she had to be flexible now, for their sakes.
They had had a hard blow, with their father telling them that he was gay, especially Will.
And on top of it, was moving to another country with his lover for six months.
“You can bring her,”
Oona confirmed.
Meghan didn’t have a boyfriend.
She hadn’t had a serious man in her life in Washington, and she was planning to go far away for a long time.
She didn’t want to be tied down to a long-distance relationship and had been careful not to get serious about anyone.
“I’m sorry I’m not going with you,”
Charles said softly.
“No, you’re not.”
Meghan looked at him dead in the eye when she said it.
“You’re doing exactly what you want to do.”
She hated him on her mother’s behalf.
And Oona realized how odd it was that she didn’t.
She didn’t hate him, she didn’t feel anything for him, except pity.
He was a weak, confused man, who was making selfish decisions that she knew would hurt their children, but she couldn’t stop him and she didn’t try to.
She would do her best to give them the support they needed, and they would have to make their peace with it over time.
Charles would have to live with the consequences of his actions.
She couldn’t protect him this time and had no desire to.
He had made his plans with Roberto, without consulting her, and with total disregard of how it would affect his children.
She wondered if he really would be happy now, and when he left the apartment, shortly after their children left together, she realized that she didn’t care how Charles felt now.
It was over for her.
Whatever she had felt for him for twenty-five years was dead.
She could have still loved him, knowing he was gay.
But not with his selfish indifference to his children’s feelings.
They needed time with him now, to adjust to the situation.
Instead he was running away to play with his boyfriend.
She had lost all respect for him as a father, and as a man, whatever his sexual orientation. It was all about him, and she realized now it always had been. She could see it clearly now.