He Told Me I Lost Our Baby, and Five Years Later I Met Him at His Door novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: The Scar on His Heel

I did not tell Cormac what the receptionist had said.

I got back into the truck and told him to take me home, and he did, and he did not ask.

I watched him not ask the whole way up Blue Hill Avenue.

I understood, with a small cold shock, that this was the same silence he had kept in my marriage.

It was a different silence now, because it was held out to me with both hands, but it was shaped the same.

He would wait forever.

That was the trouble with it.

I needed to see the boy, and I did not need anyone's permission to do it.

Padraig's wife lived in Quincy, in a white house on a short street, with a garden of wet chrysanthemums by the door.

She had texted me on Tuesday evening.

He's with me after school on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Come at four. I'll leave the side gate.

I parked the Corolla around the corner at ten to four on Thursday, and went in through the gate.

The kitchen was warm and yellow and smelled of toast.

Padraig's wife stood at the stove in her red coat, still wearing it.

She looked at me with her hands wrapped in a tea towel.

"He's through there," she said. "Drawing."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me." Her voice was small and fierce. "I've been married to that man fifteen years, and he's slept on the sofa for five of them. I know when somebody's keeping something."

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