He Missed the Delivery Room. I Married His Enemy Instead. novel · Chapter 14 of 32

Chapter 14: Stitches

I watched it to the end.

That twenty-second clip.

The man on the ground stopped trying to get up halfway through.

Conall stopped soon after.

He stood there breathing, his hand hanging open, and then he walked out of the frame.

"That's who's holding my daughter on Sundays," Davis said.

"Send it to my lawyer."

"Brig, look at it."

"I looked at it. Send it to my lawyer, and go home in a cab."

I got in my car and locked the doors.

My hands were steady on the wheel all the way up the ramp.

Conall's car was across the street where he'd said it would be.

I parked behind it and got in his passenger seat.

"Nine to six," he said. "I heard it on the radio."

"Davis has a video of you."

I told him what was in it.

He didn't interrupt.

When I finished, he looked out the windshield at Mercy's dark ambulance bay.

"February," he said. "Outside my pub. A man had my bartender by the hair, halfway into his car. She's twenty-three. She'd told him no at the bar four times."

"And you."

"I hit him more than I needed to." He didn't look away from the bay. "I'm not going to tell you it was pretty, Brigid. You saw it."

"Did she go to the police?"

"She didn't want to. He hasn't been back to Southie."

I sat with that.

He didn't ask me what I thought.

He started the car and drove me home, and he didn't touch my hand, and I noticed.

The flowers started the next morning.

White roses, two dozen, at Conall's door at eight.

The card said "I missed it. D."

They came the next day, and the next, with the same card.

Conall signed for them himself every morning, very politely, and carried them straight out to his car.

"Where do they go?" I asked on the fourth day.

"Your grandfather's church. The widows' lunch."

"Does Davis know?"

"He will. The widows wrote him a thank-you note."

The voicemails came at night.

I deleted them without listening, except one, by accident, where he was singing a lullaby off key and stopped halfway.

I deleted that one twice.

I set up his visits the way I'd set up anything at work.

Saturday mornings, ten to noon, at my mother's kitchen table.

My mother supervised.

My mother supervised.

The first Saturday, Davis came at nine-fifty in a sweater that still had the fold lines in it.

He held Niamh.

"Neeve," he said to her carefully. "Neeve. Hi."

She stared at him with my father's scowl and filled her diaper.

He looked up at my mother in panic.

My mother sipped her tea.

"You're her father," she said. "Fathers change diapers."

He didn't know how.

That afternoon, after Davis left, my mother taught Conall at the same table.

"Tabs at the back," she said. "Not like that. You're wrapping a fish."

"I've never wrapped a fish."

"You've wrapped worse things than fish, Conall Byrne."

Niamh kicked him in the chin.

Grandda watched from the other end of the table with his cards and his pacemaker.

"Deal you in after?" he asked.

"You cheat," Conall said.

"I do. Sit down."

Conall sat down, and lost eleven dollars, and paid it in cash.

Niamh stayed the night at my mother's, because my mother asked, and because she'd started sleeping six hours there and only four anywhere else.

I drove back to Southie alone.

The row house was dark.

At eleven the back door banged open.

Conall came in holding his left forearm against his shirt, and the shirt was red to the elbow.

"Don't," he said. "It looks worse than it is."

"I'll decide what it looks like."

The kid came in behind him, white.

"Somebody put a brick through the pub window," the kid said. "With a FINISH THE JOB sign wrapped round it. He pulled the bartender back off the glass."

"Go home, kid," Conall said.

"He grabbed the glass with his arm, Doc. Like a dummy."

"Go home," I said. "He'll keep the arm."

The kid went.

I got the red duffel from the basement.

Conall sat on the edge of the kitchen counter because I told him to, and I cut his sleeve off with the shears.

The cut was four inches long, clean, along the outside of his forearm.

No tendon. No artery.

I numbed it, and I washed it out, and I started to sew.

He didn't watch the needle.

He watched me, like he had at the table with the kid.

"Your bartender," I said. "She's the one from February."

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