Chapter 6 #3
Liam took the block. His hand was shaking — barely, a tremor so small you’d only see it if you knew what his hands looked like when they were steady, and I did.
I had held those hands for five years. I had watched them sign business deals and pour wine and trace the lines of my body in the dark. I had never seen them shake.
“Thank you,” he said. His voice was quiet and completely wrecked. “Thank you, Fern.”
She babbled something. Grabbed another block. Held that one out too.
For the next forty minutes, Liam sat on the floor of my apartment and let his daughter teach him how to play.
She gave him blocks and he took them. She showed him the rabbit and he admired it.
She clapped — the new trick, three uncoordinated smacks — and he clapped back, and she did it again, delighted, and he did it again, and they went back and forth until she lost interest and reached for his hand instead.
She grabbed his finger. Wrapped her whole fist around it. Held on.
I watched from the doorway. I had stationed myself there when he sat down — a strategic distance, close enough to intervene, far enough to not be in the scene.
Kinsey was in the kitchen, visible through the pass-through, leaning against the counter with a cup of coffee she wasn’t drinking and her eyes locked on Liam with the unblinking focus of a woman running a security detail.
He didn’t try to pick her up. He didn’t reach for her, didn’t pull her closer, didn’t do any of the things that would have crossed the invisible line Kinsey and I had drawn.
He let Fern set the pace. She came to him.
She grabbed his finger. She babbled at him in her private language and he listened like she was saying the most important things anyone had ever said.
At two-forty he looked at me. Over Fern’s head, across the small room, his eyes found mine.
I have spent a year and a half building walls.
Walls of silence, walls of distance, walls of anger and self-sufficiency and the fierce architecture of a life that needed no one.
I built them well. I built them to last. Every brick was a reason: the affair, the couch, the divorce, the three weeks of hotel rooms with a woman whose name I now knew, the look on his face when he said it didn’t mean anything, the settlement I refused, the pregnancy I hid, the child I raised alone.
Every reason was valid. Every brick held. The wall stood.
And he looked at me over our daughter’s head with Fern’s fist wrapped around his finger, and I felt every single brick tremble.
I didn’t look away. Neither did he. The moment lasted three seconds, maybe four — long enough for the whole apartment to hold its breath, for Kinsey to go still in the kitchen, for Fern to babble something that sounded like a question neither of us could answer.
Then Fern tugged his finger toward her mouth, because everything went in the mouth at seven months, and he laughed — a short, startled sound, so different from the polished laugh I’d heard at a thousand Buchanan events that it could have been a different person — and the moment broke, and I breathed again.
At two fifty-five Kinsey appeared in the living room. “Five minutes,” she said. Neutral. Fair. The timekeeper’s voice.
Liam nodded. He looked at Fern, who was still holding his finger, and I saw him make the decision not to resist. Not to ask for more time, not to negotiate, not to do any of the things his training and his resources and his instincts were telling him to do.
He had been given one hour. He would take one hour.
He gently extracted his finger from Fern’s grip. She protested — a short, outraged squawk that was pure indignation — and he smiled at her, and the smile was the most unguarded thing I’d ever seen on his face.
“I’ll come back,” he said to her. Quiet. A promise made to a baby who couldn’t understand it. “If your mom says I can come back, I’ll come back.”
He stood up. Brushed off his jeans. Looked at Kinsey, who gave him nothing. Looked at me.
“Thank you,” he said.
Two words. No embellishment, no grand speech, no performance. Just gratitude, offered simply, the way a person thanks someone who has given them something they don’t deserve and know it.
“You’re welcome,” I said.
He left. I heard his footsteps on the stairs — three flights down to the street. The building door opened and closed. Silence.
Fern looked at the doorway where he’d been standing. She looked at the space on the floor where he’d been sitting. She looked at me. Then she held out the green block to the empty room and made a sound that wasn’t quite a word but wasn’t quite not one.
I crossed the room and sat on the floor beside her and took the block.
“I know,” I said.
Kinsey was standing in the kitchen doorway, watching us. Her arms were crossed, her coffee untouched, her face doing something complicated I couldn’t parse.
“Well?” I said.
She was quiet for a long time. Then she said, “He didn’t bring a lawyer.”
“No.”
“He didn’t bring his father.”
“No.”
“He sat on the floor for an hour and let a baby drool on his finger and he left when I told him to.”
“Yes.”
She uncrossed her arms. Picked up her coffee. Took a sip that I suspected was mostly to buy time.
“Damn it,” she said.