11. Cillian #2
“He doesn’t know about you,” she continues. “I told him his father didn’t know he existed. That if you had known—”
She pauses and something passes through her face but is quickly put away.
“He’s started asking more questions lately. He’s at that age,” she explains, a bit defensively. I nod dumbly because all that keeps going through my mind is “I was pregnant when you left Belfast.”
She reaches into her bag and takes out a photograph, sliding it across the table. I pull myself out of my racing thoughts to look at it.
It’s a photograph of a boy, roughly around eight years old.
He sits on a stone garden wall, with a rolling green field behind him.
The sun is low and bright and he’s squinting into it. He isn’t quite smiling but looks like he’s deciding whether to.
My eyes drink in his features.
He has light brown hair, cut short, and sticking up a little where it’s grown out.
Even though he’s squinting, I can see that he has brown eyes.
He has a strong jaw for a kid.
I pick up the photograph.
The hair is wrong. Mine’s auburn. His is lighter. The eyes are hers completely.
But the jaw. I know that jaw.
The set of the shoulders. The mouth, pressed into a flat, thoughtful line.
I know that expression and now I’m looking at it on the face of an eight-year-old boy sitting on a garden wall somewhere in Ireland.
I put the photograph face down on the table.
“We used protection,” I say levelly, maybe even a little accusatory. I always used protection when I had sex. That was a non-negotiable.
Not even the girl saying she was on birth control would convince me.
You can never trust anyone, and I certainly wasn’t going to be on the hook for some bastard for the next eighteen years.
It turns out I wasn’t careful enough.
“Yes.” She meets my gaze. “I know we did. These things happen.”
I want to argue the point, but I also know she’s right. “I need a paternity test,” I tell her in an uncompromising tone.
She nods, as if she expected this. “Of course. Whatever you need.”
“Before anything else,” I continue firmly. “Before any other conversation about anything.”
“Okay.” Her hands loosen slightly on the coffee cup, like that was the part she was braced for and she’s got through it. “I’m not offended by that. I figured you would ask for something like that.”
I look at the photograph face down on the table. I don’t pick it up again, but I want to pick it up again.
“What’s his name?” I ask, suddenly wanting to know everything about this boy, but also not wanting to know too much.
Claire shifts a little uncomfortably, as if she’s not sure she wants to divulge this information. “Finn.”
“Finn.” I taste the name, turning it over in my mind. Finn. Finn Murphy. Finn…Brennan? “And he asks about his father.”
Her face softens briefly before it hardens back into its unflinching mask. “Yes,” she says quietly. “He does.”
I sit with that for a moment. I understand that feeling. I, too, wish I could ask more about my father, know more about him. He died when I was so young, I barely remember him.
I stand up abruptly, chair screeching on the floors. Claire doesn’t even flinch. “I’ll be in touch about the test,” I tell her. “Call me if you need anything.”
I go home.
Valentina is in the kitchen when I come in, standing at the counter eating crackers and reading something on her phone.
She’s in a deep green sweater that she wears when she’s not going anywhere.
She’s worn it so much that the right cuff is stretched out from where she pulls it over her palm when she’s cold.
Her hair is pulled back into a messy top knot, several strands framing her face.
I fight the urge to tuck them behind her ears. I can’t do that; not when Claire and Finn are running through my mind.
She looks up when I come in and her eyes do a quick pass over my face. “How was Connor’s?”
I went to Connor’s first specifically so I wouldn’t be lying when she asked. It was a fifteen-minute stop, long enough to get a coffee and exchange two sentences with Walsh about the Queens situation.
Long enough to make the alibi real.
“Fine,” I tell her. I cross to the fridge and get a bottle of water. “You eat anything today besides crackers?”
“I had vegetable soup,” Valentina says.
I raise an eyebrow at her as I unscrew the bottle and take a drink, watching as she pushes the last cracker away from her. “That’s not a lot of calories.”
“I’m fine, Cillian.”
I put the glass in the sink and look at the counter.
The crackers are there, along with a brand new box of almond milk.
All symbols of the small routines we’ve built. Then I think about the photograph face down on the table in a coffee shop in Queens.
“I have some calls to make,” I tell her.
She looks at me. Not saying anything, just studying me.
She’s been doing that a lot lately—like she’s taking notes in her head.
She’s been watching me very closely, trying to figure out what’s going on. I know she is.
I’m not giving her anything, and that probably makes it worse.
“Okay.” She goes back to her phone.
I go to my study and shut the door. I sit at my desk and stare at my hands.
All I can think about is the photo of the boy. The straight line of his mouth.
I’m going to figure this out. I’m going to get the test done, and then I’ll know what I’m dealing with. Then I’ll tell Valentina. There’s no point telling her now when I don’t know anything real. No point putting this on a pregnant woman when it might turn out to be—
I stop.
I know what the test is going to say. I’ve known since I turned the photograph face down in that coffee shop so I’d stop myself staring at it.
I’m not waiting for information.
I’m waiting for the courage to have the conversation.
I meet Claire again three days later at another coffee shop, this time in Midtown. This one is a little more upscale with homemade desserts in the case and baristas in beige aprons scurrying around, fulfilling orders.
Claire is already there, wearing a soft pink turtleneck sweater, her hair braided tightly back. It’s so weird seeing her with long hair, but then again I only knew a snapshot of her for six weeks nine years ago.
She has a folder on the table this time. She pushes it toward me when I sit down and I open it.
There’s a copy of Finn’s birth certificate. The father field is blank and something in my chest does something I put away immediately.
There’s a school photo underneath, the ones they take at the beginning of the school year, where kids wear slightly formal clothes and smile wooden expressions to the camera.
Finn’s lost a front tooth in this photo.
He looks more childlike in the photo with that missing tooth. His dark eyes are wide. I look at the gap where the tooth is missing and I wonder whether it came out clean or whether it was the long wobbling kind that takes weeks.
Does he believe in the Tooth Fairy? Did it hurt when it came out?
Does he cry easily or is he a tough child?
It bothers me more than it should that I know nothing about him.
I look at the rest of his face instead. The eyes are hers.
The dark brown, the shape of them. The nose—I can’t tell.
It’s hard to say with a kid this age. The jaw I thought was mine in the first photograph looks more rounded in this one, more like a kid’s jaw than I remembered.
The ears, maybe. There’s something about the ears that I keep coming back to then second-guessing.
The ears could be mine. Or they could just be ears. But they also look like my mom’s ears.
“He likes football,” Claire says. She’s watching me look at the photo. “Or as you call it, soccer. And he likes maps. Geography, too. He can name the capital of any country in the world.” She smiles fondly. “He’ll quiz you on it and get annoyed if you get one wrong.”
I put the photograph down, my heart hammering and a bead of sweat trickling down my back.
A kid who takes information seriously and gets irritated when other people don’t. Who needs to know the capital cities of every country, who wants answers to be precise and correct.
I know what kind of child that is. I was that kind of child. Connor found it useful. Brigid said I was insufferable and correcting adults was rude. I spent most of my childhood in rooms where nobody took anything seriously enough and it drove me nuts.
I look at the photograph again.
“He’s a really good kid,” Claire says, quietly. “Whatever you’re thinking right now—whatever you’re deciding…” She swallows nervously. “I want you to know that.”
“I’m not deciding anything,” I tell her coolly, looking up at her.
She bites her lips and nods. “Okay.”
I need to change the subject. “The test,” I say. “How do we arrange it?”
Claire looks relieved at the exchange of topic and rattles off the name of a clinic. Results in a few days. I shouldn’t be surprised. She’s clearly been planning this and I tell her this.