Chapter 40
CHAPTER FORTY
MAISIE
She didn’t mean for this to happen.
“I didn’t know who he was, Iain. I’m sorry.”
His dad. Maisie might’ve figured it out if there had been much of a resemblance at all between them, but there wasn’t, which she supposed Iain approved of. At least, he might do if he stopped scuffing a line back and forth in his hardwood floor.
“Don’t apologise, you’ve done nothing wrong,” he said without looking at her, his angered breathing making more sound than his voice. “It’s him . He has no fucking right to turn up like this. He has no right to talk to you.”
“I don’t think he knew who he was talking to at first,” Maisie replied in an attempt to placate Iain’s furious strides.
She couldn’t pretend to understand the complexities of what had gone on between them in the past, or why Alun’s presence at today’s match was so triggering to cause this reaction in Iain. If Alun was trying to make contact so repeatedly then clearly there was something he wanted to say. Something worthy of turning up on a whim to a rugby game.
Iain’s fingers dug into his hips. “If he wanted to get to me then he should’ve come down from the stands himself,” he snapped, though Maisie knew his bite wasn’t directed at her.
“Would you actually have let him get anywhere near you if he did?”
That made Iain pause his huffing. He flashed a passing glance her way across the room. “Not with you there.”
Maisie’s ear fell to her shoulder in lieu of a sigh. “Iain, he’s your dad. There must be a reason why?—”
“That adage about blood being thicker than water is only half of the story. If he cared, then he would’ve let me leave the farm when I wanted to.”
“Didn’t he?” she said warily. “You’re not there now?—”
“Because I had to run , Maisie.” Iain strode towards her, so devastated and worn down that Maisie’s heart twisted in knots. “In the middle of the night,” he said, “I drove away. I couldn’t live another day on that farm.” He shrugged, yet the loose movement was filled with years of pain. His voice softly broke – “I couldn’t. It would’ve killed me.”
The tightening behind Maisie’s nose and eyes built itself up to make them well with tears for him, for the way he looked both young and old with years of forced away emotion rising to his surface.
His voice cracked as he said, “It got so lonely. The hours were incredibly long, from before dawn to after dusk, and I couldn’t ever see friends, so I lost them all. We never had any money because all of it went to the farm with every flood, every broken machine. So much depended on us – if something went wrong then the whole season could be thrown to shit. And on top of that, there was him there blaming every inconvenience on me. And now I am exactly what he said I was going to be if I left: a failure.”
Iain’s red-rimmed eyes tugged on a thousand strings within Maisie and cinched them all around her heart. How different their childhoods had been was so unfair, and the realisation made her stomach swim. How could she have complained about being back here again? to this town that held so many amazing, good memories. How could she say she was trapped, when really she knew nothing of being trapped at all.
His beard scratched her palms when she cupped his face, her chin trembling. Iain tried to pull away, to turn his gaze somewhere else, but she wouldn’t let him. For once in his life, he needed these words told to him.
“Someone who stands up for what they want and chooses their own path isn’t a failure, Iain.”
“Feels that way,” he mumbled.
“Well it’s not true.” Maisie hoped he listened to her firm words instead of tossing them aside. “I’ve listened to you telling me about him, about what he put you through with the way he spoke to you, how all of that made you feel worthless, and the way you left and built a new life when that was the hardest choice is something to be proud of, Iain,” she said, brushing her palm lower to cradle his neck. “ I am proud of it.”
Mossy eyes cut to hers, a long inhale expanding Iain’s broad chest. “This should all be enough to make you run away from me,” he uttered, and maybe in his mind he was right. But not to Maisie.
“I learned my lesson on running the first day I met you.”
A sad smile touched the corner of his mouth.
“I’m only encouraging you to see what he wants because … he didn’t look well, Iain.”
The crinkles around his eyes deepened when they pinched. “Well?” he repeated, unsure.
Maisie struggled to think of how to put this delicately. “The last time you saw him, did he shake?” Iain’s brow went tense again. “His hands, did they shake?”
“No.”
“Well, they did today. And he could barely pick his feet up when he tried to leave the stand.”
Iain shifted his weight, looking down at her like the pieces of what she said were coming together in his mind. “You think something is wrong with him.”
Maisie didn’t want to be insensitive, but yes, she did.
Her hands brushed down to rest on his chest. “I think that’s why he’s trying to contact you, and that’s the only reason why I’m suggesting you call him,” she said. “I think you’ll regret not finding out. And what if it’s something that could affect you too one day? You don’t need to be worrying if it will for the rest of your life.”
Iain stared at her for another two drawn-out breaths before looking away as if he’d been defeated. He’d once described his mind as a mess and she could see it stirring then, trying to make some sense out of this information. His breaths had evened out but the muscles beneath Maisie’s palms were still tense. He was an elastic band stretched too far. One slip and the band would leap into life and shoot away. She didn’t want that.
It was a few indecisive beats before Iain went with slow, heavy steps to his kit bag he’d left by the front door hours ago. Choosing to take a seat on the sofa – Maisie hoped it might encourage him to sit, too – she watched behind her as he rummaged, pulling out his phone. His hand trembled as he came round to sit on the cushion next to hers.
“Do you want me to do it?” Maisie softly offered, her body angling towards him braced and seated beside her.
Eyes low, Iain shook his head. He gripped the phone tighter in the gap between his wide-set knees. “No. It’s fine.”
With a few taps, he unlocked the screen, hovered his thumb over a contact that was as empty as one you’d expect to have for your dentist, then called the number. As the dial tone rang on speakerphone, Ted wandered over and hopped up beside them, curling and resting his head on Iain’s thigh.
Hunched forwards, Iain sat tense; his broad shoulders and bent spine called out for the soothing rub of Maisie’s hand.
The dial ended.
“Hello?”
Maisie recognised the man’s voice from the morning. It held the same detached tone as Iain’s when he’d discovered who she’d been there with in the stands.
She held her breath as Iain dug his blunt nails down through his beard. “Da?”
Alun’s pause on the line made Maisie’s stomach inch higher towards her heart. “Iain ...”
“I heard you went to my game,” Iain said, his old gruffness roughening his voice.
“Yes … Met your girlfriend. She seems like a lovely dynes Saesnes ? * . Wouldn’t stop cheering you on the whole match.”
Girlfriend. Maisie’s heart kicked up into a desynchronised rhythm. They hadn’t talked about what they were exactly yet – it’s what she’d tried to get him to talk about earlier before he’d backed down. Things were so up in the air, and now with this rift with his father making that air tense, she had a feeling she would be suspended in unlabelled uncertainty for even longer.
Looking over at her, Iain said something in Welsh, though his eyes were so intense Maisie couldn’t imagine what it was. So much of him was still a mystery unfolding for her, and there were parts that he probably didn’t want her to learn by overhearing like this. He might say the things he needed to if she wasn’t here looking over his shoulder.
Standing, she left to give them privacy.
Fifteen minutes later, Iain came upstairs, his feet heavy on the steps. He mustn’t have realised that she’d left his bedroom door half open, because when he paused on the landing and hung his head, she saw the way it shook, how he raked his fingers through his hair.
Ted, who’d wandered upstairs to her ten minutes ago as if worried she’d gotten lost, picked his head out of her lap when the door creaked open.
“How did it go?” Maisie asked softly.
Iain trudged through his sparsely decorated bedroom, putting one knee on the bed which she’d remade, and then the other. Crawling up next to her, he wrapped his arm around her shoulders and let his weight go against the wooden headboard with a sigh. “Something definitely isn’t right,” he lamented, then said the last thing Maisie expected. “I’m going to drive over tomorrow. My brothers will be there too.”
“I’ll come with you to see them, if you want,” she offered. “Even if it’s just to wait in your car while you go inside.”
“I’d appreciate it. Thank you.” Iain sounded as tired as he looked.
Ted bumped Maisie’s stomach with his nose, prompting her to resume her petting. “I think I’ll need to go and see Nain too. I think I upset her this week.”
Iain’s brows drew together. “What happened?”
“She let herself in whilst I was on a work call, and I got irritated. I told her she had to tell me when she wanted to come over.”
She’d done a little more than that – she’d started off into a full-blown rant.
“You set the boundary you needed to set.” Iain nuzzled in her hair. “Don’t feel guilty for it.”
But she did. Maisie couldn’t help it. She was so fed up with having to stand up for herself all the time in public – if not for her size and just being herself then certainly with men . She didn’t think she’d have to do it with her family, too.
She twirled her fingertip in Ted’s wiry fur. “Can I ask you … What did you feel when you left the farm?”
All Iain answered was – “Lost.” She thought he would say no more, but he said, “I led my own life for the first time, though I didn’t get far.”
Maisie watched the way he stared numbly across the room. “You took your life back into your own hands. You moved to new places, did new things. You almost got married. And none of what came before that was your fault.”
Iain’s chest rumbled some kind of agreement.
Maisie pressed her palm above his heart and felt its fierce beating. “How you were treated wasn’t your fault,” she said. His gaze refused to meet hers, but she knew avoidance well. “Come on, speak those words to me, Mountain Man.”
He gave her a side-eye.
She curled her fingers like she was teasing words out of him. “Say it with me. It was not … ”
“It was not my fault,” he drawled just to appease her.
“A bit more gusto, please.”
“It was not. My. Fault.” Iain said the words with more conviction, but then a breath shuddered out of him. His eyes became glassy as those words sank in.
Maisie couldn’t heal all of him, but she could help him get there piece by piece.
“There.” She patted his chest, running her hand down his solid stomach to curl her arm around his waist. “Now when we go to see Alun tomorrow, you can go with your shoulders a little lighter.”
Iain gazed at her for a long second. “How do you do that?”
“Do what?”
His head still shook slowly. “Make me feel as though there isn’t a storm in my mind?”
Maisie didn’t know. All she knew was that he deserved so much love – and she wanted to give it all to him. She twisted and captured his lips in a kiss that gave the answer she couldn’t form with words.
“Could we maybe have that conversation now?” she asked when they pulled apart.
Iain filled his chest, his gaze falling. “Could it wait a little longer? Tomorrow. After we see my dad, I promise.”
It wasn’t ideal, but now that he had tomorrow’s meeting in his mind, one more day couldn’t hurt.
“Sure.”
Maisie clutched and held on tightly to the threads of him that were slowly slipping through her fingers.
Commitment was a scary thing for Iain – it was for her too – and this newness between them was still exactly that: new. So Maisie put her faith in the fact he was figuring out his feelings, and that things would all be okay when he did.
* ? English woman