I could see it in his face the second he opened the door. He was going to tell me.
God damn his inherent honesty and screwed up integrity.
I couldn’t decide if he was the bravest or the most foolish man I’d ever met. Probably both.
And yet, I understood how he was feeling. I’d wrestled with telling him about Vincent for a long time after it happened. A few times, the words had almost spilled out, but I’d stopped them just in time, desperate to give us a chance to make it work. That doubt ended the moment I discovered I was pregnant.
I wasn’t going to rob my child of her father because of my mistake. If that meant I lived with the guilt, then that was what I’d do, because she mattered so much more than I did. My child deserved to be with the father who I knew would adore her every day of her life.
Colm and I loved each other, and we could make an incredible home for her, create the family I’d never had. I had no right to take that away from her.
So I never told him, and honestly? I never regretted that for a single moment.
Maybe that made me a terrible person, but I would rather live with the consequences of my choice, than blow up my family by doing what other people would consider to be the right thing.
I still believed it was for the best. It hadn’t tainted our marriage and it hadn’t complicated Vincent’s life either. The last I heard, he’d married Carole, they were living in New York and happy. It may have taken a twisting path, but he’d found his love.
And so had I.
It was Colm who was on his knees in front of me now, his arms around me, holding me while I sobbed. Not for the father I had lost, because the truth was I’d never really had one. I cried for the dad my daughter could lose. The man I could lose.
I couldn’t let that happen. At least, not before his illness took that out of our hands.
I wanted every day from now until then to be as perfect as it could be. If he told me, yes, of course, I’d forgive him, but it would always be there, a wedge between us. I knew him. He thought it would ease his guilt but it wouldn’t erase it completely, and he’d always wonder whether I stayed because I loved him or because he was dying.
The doubt and regret would drown our days and shadow our nights.
‘Shhhhh,’ he soothed me, stroking my hair. Only when my shoulders stopped shaking and my trembling hands were still, did he ease back from me, take Beth’s blanket from the back of the chair and wrap it around me.
He stayed on the floor, his face so earnest that I wanted to reach down, caress his cheek.
‘I’m so sorry, Shauna. What happened?’
‘He had a heart attack. He was with Rosie.’
I saw the confusion, then he went with the most obvious conclusion. ‘He was at the café?’
I shook my head. ‘No. He was…’ My lungs ran out of breath and I had to pause to refuel them. ‘He was having an affair with Rosie – has been for as long as we’ve been together.’
His initial reaction, like mine, was overwhelming disbelief. ‘What? No. No way. Rosie wouldn’t.’
‘She did.’
‘Shit.’
‘They were together this afternoon when he collapsed. She phoned an ambulance, took him to hospital, called my mother…’
‘Your mother knew about Rosie?’
‘She did.’
‘Jesus wept. I’ll never understand them.’
‘I won’t either,’ I said. The sorrow was choking me but the irony was hard to miss.
My parents had spent their lives ignoring their indiscretions, an aspect of their behaviour that I’d always despised. Now I was choosing to do the same.
Perhaps it should make me feel more compassionate towards them, but it didn’t.
They choose to ignore the infidelities for themselves, I was choosing to do it for the family I loved and the child that I cherished. If that made me a hypocrite, I’d take it.
‘How do you feel about Rosie?’ he asked, still astonished.
I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. This afternoon I was furious. Raging. How could she do that? How could she be with him and also be the friend I spoke to every day, yet those two lives were separate? But if I put the fact that he was my dad to one side, she sacrificed years of her life for a man she couldn’t have. That’s beyond tragic. Now I just feel… sorry for her. She’s lost fifteen years on someone who wasn’t worth her heart.’
I pulled the blanket tighter around me to stop the shivers. He reached over, pushed back my hair, stroked my face.
‘Losing him must hurt,’ he said softly. ‘I know you weren’t close, but he was still your dad.’
Emotional preconceptions. My father had died so I should be grief-stricken. Colm had been told he had terminal cancer, so he should be inconsolable. Yet, neither of us was playing by the rulebook. Maybe nobody ever really did.
‘I’m sad that someone’s life has ended,’ I told him honestly. ‘But I don’t feel like I lost a father, because I can’t mourn something I never had. Does that make sense?’
Colm nodded wordlessly, just listening, letting me talk.
‘I feel… angry. I know I shouldn’t, that probably makes me a heartless bitch, but I do.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he never pretended. Was I not even worth that? Could he not even have acted like he cared, called me up once in a while, took an interest, told me I mattered? Even if he didn’t feel it, even if we both knew it was a lie, I just… I would have taken that. I would have convinced myself it meant something and I would have been able to live with it. Why couldn’t he just have pretended to love me?’
There were no tears left now, just my voice, distorted by heartache. Colm knew better than to make false protestations about my father’s feelings for me. He’d been around for a decade of my life, he’d lived through my parents’ disinterest in me and in Beth and there was no denying it. Still, he tried to look for explanations.
‘Perhaps he didn’t want to lie to you.’
‘He should have.’ The words were more forceful than I intended. I took a breath. ‘Sometimes it’s not about honesty, Colm. Sometimes loving someone, truly caring for them is about protecting them from the truth, guarding their heart. Even if the person you’re protecting them from is yourself.’
His beautiful green eyes were locked on mine now, and I saw the recognition, the understanding, the very moment of realization.
He knew. The conversation was about my father. But we were actually talking about us.