5. Declan #2
Neither did I. Not like that. Not with someone who made leaving feel like the dangerous part. Then I woke up alone. For seven years, I let that ending rewrite everything that came before it.
The memory recedes, leaving the present colder by comparison. Talia is watching me.
“You left,” I say.
Her face tightens. “Yes.”
“Before I woke up.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
The question is quieter than the others. It costs more, too.
She looks down at her hands. “Because I was scared.”
I almost reject that on instinct. It would be easier to keep the hurt clean, to let her be cruel or calculating or indifferent. But Talia’s voice is too steady for performance and too raw for strategy.
“Of me?” I ask.
“No.” Her eyes lift. “Of what I wanted from you.”
It finds a place I’m not prepared to examine.
She exhales slowly. “You were charming and beautiful and impossible, and for one night, I let myself believe that maybe wanting something was enough reason to have it. But morning came, and you were still you.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means you had a life that was always moving. Deals. Flights. Meetings. Cities. You told me yourself you didn’t stay still.”
I stare at her because I did say that. On the balcony, with her shoulder against mine and the city below us. I said stillness gave things room to catch up, and she looked at me like she understood too much.
Apparently, she had.
“You knew me for one night,” I say.
“I know.”
“And that was enough to decide I wouldn’t want him?”
“No.” Her voice sharpens for the first time. “It was enough to know I couldn’t build his life around waiting for you to decide whether you did.”
The words hit hard enough to empty the air from the room, and I take a step back from the table. Not far, just enough to put a little space between us. Because if I stay too close, I might say something neither of us can take back.
Or worse, something I mean.
Talia presses her lips together, but she doesn’t retreat. “I was twenty-nine, pregnant, alone, and trying to make a choice that would not turn my child into an afterthought in someone else’s life.”
“I would not have made him an afterthought.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know who I am.”
“No.” Her eyes shine now, though her voice remains painfully controlled. “You know who you are now. You didn’t know who you were then.”
I hate it because it sounds like an excuse, but I hate it more because some part of me recognizes the truth inside it.
Seven years ago, I was always moving; different cities, different deals, different rooms full of people to charm into agreement. I liked being wanted, liked being welcome, liked leaving before anyone expected me to become permanent. I called it ambition because ambition sounded better than running.
But Flynn.
My son.
I look toward the open door. He’s tapping the blue marker against his chin now, studying his page with the deep concentration of a child deciding whether aviation history requires more orange.
I missed everything.
The thought is so simple it is unbearable.
“I would have come,” I say.
Talia’s face crumples for half a second before she pulls it back together. “Maybe.”
“Not maybe.”
“You don’t get to know that, Declan. Neither of us does.”
“You never gave me the chance.”
“No,” she says, and now there’s steel beneath the hurt. “I gave Flynn a life that did not depend on a man I barely knew choosing us out of obligation.”
Obligation. The word finds an old wound and presses hard. I laugh once, but there is no humor in it. “So that’s what you think this would have been.”
“I think you would have done the right thing.”
“That sounds terrible.”
“It can be,” she whispers.
For a moment, neither of us speaks.
I understand then, not enough to forgive, not enough to make any of this less brutal, but enough to understand her fear. Talia did not keep him from me because she thought I was cruel. She kept him from me because she thought I would be decent.
Decent enough to stay, and decent enough to resent it. The realization makes me feel sick.
“You thought I would hate you for trapping me,” I say.
Her eyes close briefly, and that’s answer enough.
“Talia.”
“I didn’t want that for him.” Her voice breaks slightly before she steadies it.
“I didn’t want him growing up loved with conditions.
I didn’t want him wondering whether every visit, every birthday, every phone call came from love or responsibility.
I knew what it felt like to be someone’s obligation, and I was not going to build my son’s life around that. ”
My anger stumbles. Not gone. God, no, but wounded by something that looks too much like understanding.
Outside the room, Flynn slides off the bench and wanders closer to the open door, holding up his coloring page to inspect it. He doesn’t come in. He just stands there, small and bright under the lobby lights, and his hair refusing order.
My son.
I have known him for less than half an hour, and I already want to protect him from everything, including myself.
That thought cuts deeper than I expect.
“I’m not asking you to apologize for protecting him,” I say.
Talia looks at me quickly; the words surprise both of us.
I drag a hand through my hair, then drop it because I suddenly understand how close I am to unraveling in a conference room while my son stands in the doorway. Talia smiles at him, and he returns to the bench.
“I am asking you to understand what it feels like to stand here and realize I have missed six years of his life because you decided I was too much of a risk.”
Her throat moves.
“I know.”
“No.” My voice roughens. “You don’t.”
Her eyes flash. “Don’t tell me what I know.”
“Then don’t stand there and act like this only cost you.”
That silences her, and the quiet that follows is not empty. It’s crowded with every year between us. Talia looks toward Flynn.
So do I.
He’s still at the bench making airplane noises under his breath; soft enough that only someone listening for him would hear.
Talia’s voice is quieter when she speaks again. “It cost me every day.”
The anger in me falters.
She doesn’t look at me. “You think I didn’t wonder? You think I didn’t imagine what would happen if I called? You think I didn’t sit beside his crib at three in the morning and ask myself whether I was protecting him or just afraid?”
I say nothing because there’s nothing clean to say.
“I chose,” she continues, “and then I had to keep choosing. Every time he got sick. Every time he asked a question I couldn’t answer honestly. Every time he looked at me with your eyes, and I had to remind myself that loving him was not the same as missing you.”
The room goes still, and judging by the look on her face, she realizes what she said at the same moment I do.
Missing you.
The words hang between us with a weight neither of us is prepared for, and before I can think better of it, I take a step closer.
She doesn't move away.
“Talia.”
“No.” She shakes her head once, almost to herself. “No, don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you remember.”
I do remember, and that’s the problem. I remember too much.
I remember her skin warm beneath my hands and her breath catching when I kissed the inside of her wrist. I remember the way she looked at me, open and startled, as if she hadn’t expected tenderness and didn’t quite know what to do with it when it arrived.
I remember her laughing against my mouth, then going quiet when the laughter turned into something slower.
Something that made the night feel less like an escape and more like a beginning neither of us had the courage to name.
And now, she’s standing three feet away from me, the mother of my child, her eyes bright with unshed tears she refuses to let fall. The distance between us is nothing and everything at the same time.
“That night wasn’t a mistake,” I say quietly.
Her lips part, and for one second, I think she might argue. I almost want her to.
Instead, she looks toward the doorway, toward Flynn, and something in her face closes—not completely, but enough to remind me that whatever that night was, morning still came. Six years still happened. A little boy still sits outside this room with my eyes and her whole heart.
When Talia looks back at me, her voice is barely above a whisper.
“Then stop treating it like one.”
She walks out before I can answer.
Flynn looks up as she reaches him, smiling because she is his whole world and he has no idea mine has just been split open.
Talia gathers his coloring book, his planes, his lunch box, all the small pieces of the life she built without me. She doesn’t look back as she leads him toward the elevators.
But Flynn does.
He lifts one hand in a small, uncertain wave, and I raise mine before I can think better of it.
Then the elevator doors close, and I'm left standing in the conference room with the truth, the silence, and the unbearable knowledge that my son knows how to say goodbye to strangers.