13. Valentina
VALENTINA
Claire starts talking and I listen.
Or I try to listen. Mostly I’m studying Finn.
He’s settled on the sofa cushion next to his mother with his backpack now in his lap, and he’s been usually quiet since he sat down. I haven’t been around many children, but I thought they usually can’t shut up.
He looks around the room again before he pulls at a loose thread on the strap of his backpack, his feet kicking as they dangle off the floor.
He’s a fidgety kid, but he does it quietly, like he’s learned to contain the fidgeting to things that don’t make noise.
He leans over and murmurs something to Claire.
She glances at him. “In a minute, baby.”
He leans back. “Mum. Can I have the tablet?”
Claire sighs. “Finn—”
“I can use headphones. Or I won’t turn the sound on,” he wheedles. “Please?”
Claire exhales through her nose, like she knows she’s lost the argument. She opens his backpack without looking at him, fishing out a tablet and a pair of headphones.
Finn excitedly takes them before he puts the headphones on and tucks his feet up underneath him and is immediately lost in technological heaven.
While Claire is fishing in the bag for the charging cable, I focus on Finn now that the initial shock of hearing Cillian may have a son has gone through me.
The brown hair, the dark eyes, the compact build, the serious face. I’m trying to find Cillian in him.
The auburn hair—nothing, his is a flat dark brown. The blue eyes—nothing, his are warm brown and nothing like the color I know.
Nothing. Nothing I can point to and say: there, that’s where he came from.
I know genetics are complicated and children aren’t a copy-paste situation.
My brother Gabriel was blue-eyed with sandy blond hair from our father’s side while Leo and I came out dark-haired, dark-eyed, our mother’s children through and through. Same parents, completely different people.
Children don’t always look like their fathers and I know this, but I’m finding exactly zero of my husband in this boy.
Hell, even Emma and Cillian look similar and they’re first cousins.
I glance at Claire while Finn settles.
My husband slept with this woman.
And the thing I don’t get is—why? She’s wholly unremarkable.
Her mousy brown hair looks like it hasn’t seen a stylist in ages, if the grays are anything to go by. Her ponytail isn’t sleek. Instead, pieces fall loose at the sides like they couldn’t be bothered anymore.
She’s wearing zero makeup.
Her outfit screams practical and I don’t care what I wear as long as it’s comfortable.
My eyes slide to her nails.
Unpolished and cut short. She looks like she has not considered her own appearance since she had a child. I internally scoff. I don’t understand those types of mothers who seemingly give up and enjoy looking like slobs.
Cillian slept with this woman.
Cillian, my Cillian, who owns four identical versions of the same perfectly tailored dark jacket.
Who has never walked into a room without me noticing. Who I have watched stop actual conversations just by existing in them.
That Cillian went to Belfast nine years ago and looked at this woman and thought: yes, her, this is the one.
What the fuck.
I mean. Okay. He was in his late twenties and probably doing terrible work in a strange city.
He must have been drunk out of his mind to choose her.
That’s what I’m going with, because the alternative is figuring out what the hell my husband saw in her. I’m currently pregnant and I look incredible even in leggings.
I know what Cillian’s preference is and it’s certainly not…her.
Suddenly, Emma’s disapproving face is in my head. “Don’t be bitchy, Valentina,” she says. I push it away because fuck off, Emma. You are equally as bitchy and mean.
“Hello? Are you okay?”
I snap out of my reverie, realizing Claire has been talking to me and I’ve been having not so nice thoughts about her. I flash her an insincere smile. “I’m so sorry. Please, continue.”
“Should I start from the beginning?” she asks.
“Please,” I say.
Claire looks at her mug for a second, deciding where to start, then she looks up.
“I knew Cillian over the span of eight weeks. It was the summer of 2017,” she says.
“Cillian came into a pub I used to go to—The Duke of York, on Hill Street. I noticed him straight away. He had this—” She pauses, and her mouth twitches fondly, like she’s accessing a memory she hasn’t touched in a while.
“This presence, you know? He’s the kind of person who walks into a room and you just—you can’t help but notice them, even when they’re not trying to be noticed. ”
I know exactly what she means. I hate that I know exactly what she means.
“We talked,” she continues, lost in thought. “For hours that first night. He was funny and witty but he also had a dry sense of humor.
Where you’re not sure he’s joking until you see the corner of his mouth turn up. And he listened, which is so rare for a man to do.” She looks at her mug. “He was really present, like you were the only thing in the room worth his attention.”
I take a sip of my tea, eyes locked on Claire.
“We kept running into each other after that,” she says. “Or we arranged to. It turned into—” She stops before glancing at her son. She bites her lip, struggling to verbalize what she wants to say. Get on with it, I think impatiently, my heart pounding.
“It was more than I expected it to be, for something that was always going to be temporary. We both knew he was only there for a few weeks. But there were moments where it felt like—” She pauses again, and her cheeks pinken.
“I used to wonder sometimes whether, if things had been different, he might have stayed.”
I set my mug down.
She—she really thinks Cillian Brennan would have stayed in Belfast? With her? God, she really doesn’t know him.
Cillian would never leave Connor and I don’t think Connor would allow his lackey—I mean second—to have a normal life.
But sure, yeah.
He potentially would have stayed in Belfast for a woman he’d known for less than two months.
Yeah, okay.
But I don’t let my thoughts show on my face. Instead, I keep my face open and interested.
“Then he left,” I prod, metaphorically twisting the knife.
“He left,” she confirms, looking solemn.
“And a few weeks after that I found out I was pregnant.” She blows out a breath.
“I tried to reach him. I had his first name and his description, which admittedly wasn’t a lot to go on.
The hotel he’d been staying at had already checked him out and was refusing to give me his name.
Privacy, they told me.” She pauses. “I sent two letters to the hotel anyway, hoping they would forward them to Cillian. They both came back.” She shakes her head, as if unable to believe her stupidity.
“By the time I’d managed to piece together who he actually was—Finn was already here. ”
She leaves room for me to respond. I don’t.
“By that point,” she continues, “I’d been doing it alone for long enough that I decided to keep doing it alone. I didn’t want to turn his life upside down. I didn’t want Finn growing up with a father who resented being there.” She meets my eyes. “I thought I was making the right decision.”
I nod, pretending I’m accepting her words. In reality, I think she’s full of shit. Her story makes zero sense.
I can kind of understand her thought process of not wanting to disrupt someone’s life.
Better an absent father than a reluctant one. But this is a child.
A whole human being who was going to spend his entire childhood with a blank line where his father should be, with no ability to even ask the question, because one person decided alone that the disruption was too much.
She is presenting this to me as the noble choice.
I think it’s garbage.
“Can I ask you something?” I ask, crossing my ankles.
“Of course,” she responds.
“How did you figure out who he was?” I fight the urge to uncross my legs.
I need this woman to think I’m the picture of cool.
“You said you had his first name and a description. Cillian isn’t exactly an uncommon name in Ireland and there are probably a hundred Cillian Brennans in the United States.
” I raise a brow. “That’s a long way from knowing which one he was and where to find him. ”
Claire wasn’t expecting that question, or she was and she hoped I wouldn’t get there yet.
“It took a while,” she says carefully. “Years, honestly. I kept looking, on and off. I tried tracing through people who knew him in Belfast—people who’d been around that summer, who’d maybe worked with him or known who he was.
” She bites her lip. “Eventually someone told me enough to put the picture together.”
“What picture?”
She shifts on the sofa. Her eyes go to Finn for a second then back to me. “I found out what he does,” she breathes. “What his family does. The Brennan name.” She says the last three words in a whisper. “Once I knew that, finding him was—it was easier.”
That I don’t doubt.
“So,” I say pleasantly. “You found out that Cillian works for an organized crime family.” A small pause. “And your immediate thought was: perfect, that’s the man I want my eight-year-old son to meet?”
Claire doesn’t completely flush, but her cheeks are certainly redder. Her hands tighten on the mug. “It’s more complicated than that,” she insists.
“I’m sure it is,” I say, not exactly unkindly but there’s certainly judgment.
“Finn deserves to know his father,” she says, and there’s a slight edge under the careful voice now, the first crack in the composure. “Whatever Cillian’s—whatever his work is, that doesn’t change the fact that Finn has a right to be in his life.”
“Absolutely,” I say smoothly. “I completely agree.”
I smile at her and she stares at me in disbelief, clearly unable to follow where this is going. Poor thing. She’ll get eaten up in our world.
I look down at my fingers with studied indifference before I look back up at Claire with an expression of mild, genuine curiosity, like something has just occurred to me.
“Can I ask you something else?”