Chapter 14 Declan
DECLAN
I drive without thinking. Without seeing the road beneath the wheels or the villages that I pass through. My body operates on muscle memory, gears, pedals, steering wheel, and rearview. I don’t know where I’m going until I pull up at the beach I came to with Amelia.
I sit in the car with my forehead on the steering wheel, until my brain hurts.
Amelia and Ruairi.
Amelia and Ryan Connor, the name that my son always used when he wanted to remain incognito.
Me and my son.
She allowed me to believe that the baby was mine. I don’t even know if she directly told me that she was carrying my baby or if I simply jumped to the natural conclusion that it was mine. But either way, she didn’t tell me that there was a question mark over the paternity.
She didn’t tell me that it might be my son’s child.
Fuck! I slam the top of the steering wheel with the flat of my hand. She might’ve been pregnant with my grandchild when she arrived.
I get out of the car and half-stumble, half-slide down the sandy, overgrown path to the beach. I walk down to the water and stare out across the sea. Rain is coming. The horizon is invisible between the hazy gray overhead and the darker gray reflection of the water’s surface.
The harder I try to wrap my head around what Amelia told me, the deeper I fall.
The baby. The child that I believed was mine, created from love and passion and something unbreakable, could be my grandchild.
A beautiful reminder of my dead son.
A heartbreaking reminder that my wife had sex with my eldest son before she had sex with me.
I pick up a rock and hurl it into the water letting out an angry, guttural roar.
It doesn’t help, so I try again. I throw rocks and stones and handfuls of shells until my arm aches and my throat is hoarse. Nothing can erase the image of Amelia and Ruairi from my mind.
She lied to me. She promised to love and cherish till death do us part, and all the while, she didn’t know if she was carrying my baby or my son’s.
Did she lie about being in love with me too?
How can I ever believe anything she says?
How can I ever trust her?
Perhaps she told Ruairi that she loved him. She might’ve lied when she said that she didn’t know Ryan Connor was my son. Perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence that they hooked up that night. This might’ve been her agenda after all.
And like a lovesick fucking idiot, I walked straight into the trap.
A raindrop lands on my forehead with a splat.
History repeating itself.
It feels like only yesterday that Amelia and I sheltered from the rain right here on this beach, naked, desperate for each other. And now… The world is a different place.
A cruel, perverse, twisted fucking reality in which my eldest son is dead, my wife is a liar, and the baby she is carrying might not even be mine.
I stand in the rain, head tipped back, eyes closed, until I’m drenched and my teeth are chattering. Nature is cleansing. Rainfall is therapeutic.
When it passes, the angry buzzing in my head is still there, but I’ve found a way to ignore it. I climb back into the car and drive home feeling as if my chest has been ripped open again and patched together with Band-aids.
Amelia is in the foyer when I let myself back into the house.
Perhaps she was waiting for me, peering out of an upstairs window until she saw the car on the driveway.
Her eyes are dark. Her face is pale and drawn.
Gone is the vibrant bubbly woman who stood on the stairs the day she arrived and asked, “Have we met before?”
You must be confusing me with my son. You know, the man you had sex with a few days ago.
“Declan, you’re wet.” She doesn’t come any closer.
I can’t look at her. This is how it’s always going to be. Whenever I see her, I’ll picture her with Ruairi, and my heart will fucking rip open, over and over and over.
“I’m going to shower.” I head upstairs without looking back.
When I come out of the shower, Amelia is sitting on my bed, waiting for me. I towel-dry my hair and drape it over the back of the chair while I pull a sweater over my head. I can feel her eyes burning holes in the back of my skull.
“Please can we talk, Declan?” There’s fear in her voice.
I caused that. She’s afraid of what I’m going to do, afraid of what comes next, and her fear triggers a fresh wave of rage somewhere deep inside. I promised to protect her, to keep her and the baby safe, to love them no matter what.
She’s the one who lied.
How dare she act the victim now?
“Sure, we’ll talk.”
The breath leaves her body with a sigh of relief. Part of me wants to fold her into my arms, breathe in the smell of her shampoo, and tell her that we can work this out. We’re a team, remember. But my heart is too damaged to allow her back in.
So, I listen to my cold voice telling her, “I promised to keep you and the baby safe, and I’ll honor that promise.”
Her eyes grow watery, and I look away before I cave.
“This is your home. You and the baby. You’re my wife, Amelia, and I will treat you as such in all aspects but one. We will have separate rooms. I’ll bring up the child as if they’re my own, my name will be on the birth certificate, but I cannot forgive you for lying to me.”
It hurts like a fucking knife straight through the heart, but it’s the only way that I can deal with this and keep them close. I haven’t forgotten who her father is, or that the baby she is carrying is a Byrne.
But I also know that I won’t be able to share a bed with her and not touch her. I can’t be close to her and not kiss her. I won’t be able to see her naked and not want to fuck her till she begs me to stop.
She runs from the room without a word, and I follow the door’s trajectory with tears in my eyes.
Amelia doesn’t come down for meals.
She resumes her housekeeping duties, moving around the house in silence, eyes averted whenever I am near. When, a couple of weeks later, we attend a meal with some business associates in Dublin, Amelia plays her role as the deliriously happy newlywed well.
Stunning in a shimmering black dress, she smiles at me whenever I speak, leans in close during the meal, our shoulders touching, and flirts as if we can’t keep our hands off each other.
It takes all my willpower to keep my hands from tucking her hair behind her ear, to stop myself from leaning in and grazing her neck with my lips.
In the car during the journey home, she sits as far away from me on the back seat as she can get, back turned, face pressed against the passenger window creating a white patch on the glass with her breath.
I want to hold her. It would be so easy to pull her into my arms and murmur, “I’m sorry,” but the lie would still be there, growing inside her.
So, I stare out of my window and fill the ache in my chest with the memories that we made before I discovered who she really is.
Orla raises the subject early in December. “Will you and Amelia go and choose the tree for the living room, Declan?”
Niamh started the tradition when Ruairi and Eoghan were young. Every year we would take the children and let them choose a tree from the local tree farm. When she died, I kept the tradition going because it felt wrong to let them go, like allowing her memories to slip away, never to be recovered.
“I’ll ask her if she wants to go. You could go with her. Maybe it’s time for new traditions.”
She narrows her eyes behind her spectacles. “Is that what’s going on here, new traditions?”
I turn away. “I’m busy. Let me know when you need the truck for the tree.”
I manage a few steps before she says, “I don’t want to interfere, Declan but—”
“But you’re going to anyway.”
“That young woman is thousands of miles away from home. She’s pregnant with your child. She needs support. And all I see you doing is shutting her out like someone who ate the steak he ordered and then decided that he wanted lobster after all.”
She’s right. Orla is always right, and it would be impossible to hide what’s going on from her. But I can’t break her heart with Amelia’s secret too.
“I liked it better when you didn’t interfere.” I slam the study door shut behind me.
I sleep on it.
I owe it to Orla and to Niamh to keep the Christmas tree tradition going. I probably owe it to the child in Amelia’s belly too. The baby is a Byrne. He or she deserves the kind of holidays that Ruairi and Eoghan experienced when they were children.
But Amelia isn’t in the guest room the following morning.
She isn’t anywhere in the house.
The yeasty aroma of baking bread wafts through the downstairs rooms. Orla is napping in her regular seat in the conservatory. The grounds are covered in a layer of sparkling frost that has been there for several days.
I go to the garage, knowing in my heart that if Amelia were to leave, she wouldn’t take one of the vehicles at her disposal here, and I’m right. All present and accounted for.
Back inside the house, I check every room again. She isn’t there.
Panic courses through my veins. I haven’t seen her since yesterday afternoon when she told Orla that she wasn’t hungry and went upstairs to the guest room. I burst through the door and check the closet, my heart hammering against my ribs. Her clothes are still there.
She hasn’t left me.
Unless she left everything behind because it would be a painful reminder of what went wrong.
Fuck.
This is all my fault.
If anything happens to her and the baby, I’ll never forgive myself.
I take the stairs two at a time. Orla is still dozing in the conservatory. Nothing is moving outside in the hazy gray daylight. But then I notice footsteps in the frost, a faint trail heading away from the house.
I don’t wait around to grab a jacket. I follow the footsteps to the stables, my heart still beating its own accusatory tune.
At first glance, there’s no sign of her. But then I smell her familiar sweet perfume, and my heart stops yelling at me and tells me to go to her. To keep my promise. To protect her and the baby even if it hurts.
I find her in Snow’s stall, her face buried in the horse’s mane.
She turns raw eyes and swollen lips my way.
But she doesn’t come to me. She doesn’t fling her arms around my neck and tell me how much she loves me.
She doesn’t tease me with slanted eyes and a sexy smile.
Because I turned our marriage into a business transaction.
I pushed her away when all I really wanted to do was hold her.
“Amelia, I…” The words stick in my throat. Even now. Even when I can see her heart physically breaking before my eyes, I can’t get beyond the lies and make her mine again.
She shakes her head and straightens her spine, facing me squarely, one arm still looped around Snow’s neck. “I’m not going to ask you to forgive me, Declan. I don’t want your forgiveness.”
“What do you want then?” Funny how my voice can produce all the wrong words.
She steps away from Snow. “I just want you to know that I never set out to hurt you. I didn’t lie to you, Declan. I…”
“You didn’t tell me the truth either. Not until it was too late.”
She holds my gaze, and time slows down. I wish I knew what she was thinking. I wish I could take us back to her arrival and start over. But even if that were possible, would I do things differently?
No. I’d still fall in love with her. I’d still want her with every bone in my body.
“You’re right.” She swallows hard. “And I will have to live with that for the rest of my life.”
Amelia walks past me, distant enough that we don’t touch, but close enough for me to soak up the smell of her.
Then she walks back to the house, and I let her go.