Chapter 30
30
Finn told Jade about the afternoon’s events over a bottle of red wine in their back room, with Mickey lying full length across both their laps on the sofa.
She looked vulnerable. Almost as vulnerable as he’d felt earlier, and for the first time he realised this must be almost as difficult for her as it was for him. Digging up the past wasn’t something that would ever be easy for either of them.
‘It was awkward at first, Jade. There was a point where I thought I might not even see Bridie again. We had so much in common, but also so little. If that doesn’t sound completely daft.’
‘It doesn’t sound daft at all. It sounds real.’ She paused. ‘But then it changed? You managed to find some common ground?’
‘We did. And I don’t quite know how to tell you this.’ He took a gulp of wine and met her eyes. ‘I found out that my half-brother’s name is Declan Stone.’
Jade’s eyes widened in shock. ‘Not the Declan Stone that we know…’
‘Yep. Rural Developments is Bridie’s company. To be strictly accurate it’s her husband’s company. His name’s Christopher Stone. He inherited the company from his father who set it up way back in the eighties in Ireland. Apparently they started off rebuilding bomb sites in Ireland during the Troubles. Christopher’s the man Bridie left my dad for – the man who was her childhood sweetheart. I’m not making much sense, am I?’
‘Um, I’m kind of following. Are you saying that Bridie, your mother, was pregnant with Declan and that’s the reason she left you and your dad?’
‘I am. Honestly, darling. You couldn’t make it up.’
Jade shook her head in astonishment. ‘So did you tell Bridie you’d already met him?’
‘I did. And that I’d given him a well-deserved punch for coming on to my fiancée. She already knew. Well, she didn’t know the reason but she knew he’d been punched because he’d turned up at work one morning with a black eye.’
Despite everything, he was still pleased about that, Finn realised with a little shock of awareness. It was probably best he didn’t analyse that one too deeply.
‘Oh my God. What on earth did she say?’
‘She said Declan was always getting into trouble over women and she’d thought at the time that he’d probably deserved his black eye.’
‘Blimey. Although I didn’t really mean that. I meant about the fact you’d already met. Was she surprised?’
‘She was flabbergasted. We both were. So it was a huge ice breaker of sorts. When she told me Declan was my half-brother I couldn’t stop laughing. I think it was as much shock as anything else.’
‘So after that, how did it go? Did you like her? Will you see her again and meet the rest of the family?’
‘I think I’ll see her again. I’m not sure about meeting the rest of the family. My head’s still spinning.’
‘Baby steps. It’s a lot to take in.’
‘Understatement.’ He downed the rest of his glass in one. ‘I think we might need more than one bottle of this.’
‘Lucky there’s another one in the kitchen then.’
* * *
The next day, Finn’s hangover wasn’t as bad as he’d expected. He rarely drank much red wine and Jade, mindful of their early start, had hardly drunk any at all. She’d just listened while he poured the whole lot out. His emotions of years – not that they were very coherent. Everything still felt mixed up in his head and he had a feeling it would for a while. You couldn’t rewrite your history so radically without it being messy.
When they’d finally gone to bed, they’d made love. It had felt like a life-affirming, love-affirming thing to do. A beautiful constant in his life, despite all the changes. Jade had fallen asleep in his arms.
Unsurprisingly, Finn had dreamed about Declan. They’d been having dinner together at the Red Lion and had sorted out their differences. They’d both apologised and had agreed to move on. The dream was so real that when he woke up he felt as if it had already happened.
Which of course it hadn’t. He tried to imagine it happening at some point in the future – him and Declan laughing about the fact they’d had a punch-up before they’d known they were brothers. Maybe that was as crazy as him thinking he and Bridie would find the years melting away when they met as adults.
It hadn’t been like that, even when they’d really got talking. He had told her about Ben in the end. After the Declan shock, he had finally opened up to her about his own family.
Bridie had been delighted he was happily settled with a good woman, as she called Jade. And she’d been over the moon to discover she had a grandson. He had seen the light go on in her eyes and when he’d shown her photos of Ben on his phone, she had cried.
‘Oh, sweet Jesus, Finn, he’s the spit of you when you were his age. He’s gorgeous.’
She couldn’t stop scrolling through the dozens of pictures Finn had taken of Ben since he’d known him. And although there was a part of Finn that had known she was so enamoured because meeting Ben must feel like a second chance for Bridie, it had no longer really mattered.
They’d agreed when they’d finally parted that they would take things slowly. But that they did want a relationship. It wasn’t going to stop here. This was just the first of many meetings. Bridie had also told him she planned to contact her sister, Caitlin, once more, so something very positive had come of him stirring up the past, Finn thought with relief.
But all of that was in the future. There were other more pressing things on Finn’s horizon first. The art exhibition was just one week away. He hadn’t mentioned that to Bridie. He hadn’t made a conscious decision not to, it just hadn’t come up. He didn’t talk about it much to anyone, but it took up a hell of a lot of head space.
After the exhibition, he would know for sure whether he had a chance of making it as an artist. Whether it was really going to be a career or a just a glorified hobby. Worst-case scenario, he had no sales and Eleanor dropped him.
If that happened, he’d get another engineering job so he could properly pay his way and he’d carry on painting as a hobby. He couldn’t imagine stopping painting completely but he was a realist. Not many people made any proper money out of art.
More immediately he had a list of jobs for today. First up was changing a washer on the drippy tap in the spare room and there were some bills that needed paying too, the mundanity of life. Then there was some fencing that Jade had said needed attention. Then later after they’d closed up he and Jade were picking up Ben.
It was the day Carmelita was going back to the wild. They’d agreed with Sarah that they’d collect him just before dusk on their way to take Carmelita to the release spot. Jade had chosen some heathland about half a mile as the crow flies from where Sarah and Ben lived.
‘I think that’s probably where she came from in the first place,’ Jade had told them all. ‘It’s the best we’re going to get anyway.’
Finn gave himself a little shake. Changing tap washers, fixing fences, releasing foxes back to the wild – these were all in a day’s work at Duck Pond Cottage. Seeing his son was a massive bonus. Seeing Ben was always a bonus.
Sometimes he couldn’t believe how much his life had changed in the last year.
He’d gone from being a single guy, living in the city of Nottingham, to reconnecting with his one-night stand and realising he had a son. It had been amazing discovering he was a father, and getting to know his son was an ongoing miracle of a journey.
He’d also met his soulmate and moved to an idyllic smallholding in the Wiltshire countryside – meeting your soulmate was something else he’d identified with when Bridie had been relating her story. When you knew someone was right for you, you just knew.
Going from being an only child to finding out he had three siblings, not to mention a mother and a myriad of uncles, aunts and cousins, was pretty amazing too.
Finn had to confess it was all a bit mind blowing. It was all good stuff too, although that didn’t make it any less of an emotional rollercoaster – sometimes in his darker moments a small voice in his head said it was all too good to be true. That the winds of change didn’t just bring good stuff. They were always counterbalanced by disaster.
Finn was trying very hard to ignore that small voice. Nothing was going to go wrong. Good things didn’t have to be counterbalanced by disaster. There didn’t have to be a fly in the ointment, did there?