Chapter 7: Father and Son
I didn't watch it happen.
I went to the kitchen and made tea — not because I wanted it, but because my hands needed something to do.
Caitlin sat at the kitchen counter on her phone, pretending not to listen for sounds from the dining room.
We heard Richard's footsteps in the hall.
A pause.
Then the scrape of a chair.
Caitlin looked at me.
I looked at the kettle.
Fifteen minutes passed.
Then twenty.
"Should we—" Caitlin started.
"No," I said.
She went back to her phone.
At the forty-minute mark, I carried two cups of tea down the hall and set them on the small table outside the dining room door.
I didn't go in.
I went back to the kitchen.
Caitlin raised an eyebrow.
"They're talking," I said.
She let out a breath.
"Okay."
It was another hour before Richard came to find me.
He stood in the kitchen doorway.
He looked like a man who had been taken apart and put back together slightly wrong — present, functional, but rearranged.
"He has her laugh," Richard said.
"I didn't expect that."
I didn't say anything.
"He's not angry.
I thought he would be.
He's — he's remarkably calm.
He said he spent a long time being angry and it exhausted him."
"He's his mother's son," I said.
Richard absorbed that.
"He showed me photos of her.
Recent ones, and old ones.
There's one of her holding him in the hospital, right after he was born." He stopped.
Pressed his mouth together for a moment.
"She looked so young."
"She was young."
"Yes." He leaned against the doorframe.
"I told him what you said.
That she deserved better.
That I was sorry."
"What did he say?"
"He said he knew I was sorry.
He said sorry doesn't fix much but it's better than nothing." Richard looked at the floor.
"He's right."
Caitlin set her phone down.
"Is he okay?"
"I think so.
He's tired.
He said he hasn't slept properly in days." Richard looked at me.
"He asked if the offer of the spare room was still open."
"It is," I said.
Richard nodded.
He started to say something else, then stopped.
"Go to bed, Richard," I said.
Not unkindly.
Just clearly.
He went.
Caitlin and I sat in the kitchen for a while after that, not saying much.
She made herself toast she didn't eat.
I finished my tea.
"Mum," she said eventually.
"Hmm."
"Are you all right?"
I thought about the honest answer.
"I don't know yet.
I think I will be."
"That's not nothing."
"No," I agreed.
"It's not."
She came around the counter and put her arms around me from behind, the way she used to when she was small.
I put my hand over hers.
We stayed like that for a minute.
Then she kissed the top of my head and went to bed.
I sat alone in the kitchen for a while longer.
The house was quiet.
Somewhere down the hall, a young man I hadn't known existed this morning was sleeping in our spare room.
My husband was in our bedroom, carrying the weight of twenty years of choices.
My daughter had shown more grace tonight than most adults I knew.
I thought about Carol Marsh.
A nurse who worked nights so she could be home for her son.
Who raised him alone and never asked for anything.
Who wrote eleven letters that were never answered, and never once let her son see her bitterness.
May you like
I hoped she knew, somehow, that he'd found his way here.
I hoped she knew he wasn't alone anymore.
