He Banned a Baby in Our Contract, Then Found His Daughter novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Clause Seven
Lorcan Hann walks into the Gannet Tickle Co-op with a cheque and sees his own eyebrow on Millie's baby; in front of four men he says Sadie goes where he goes, and Millie buckles her into his truck and gets in the back.
The man who wrote clause seven walked into the Gannet Tickle Co-op on the second Saturday of November with sleet on his shoulders.
Clause seven said that if I ever fell pregnant, the term ended that day and he would pay to end it.
I had read it twice before I signed.
My daughter was on my hip with her fist in my collar, and she had his left eyebrow, with the gap in it where a boat hook once cut him.
Every man at the coffee table by the freezer stopped chewing.
He stood inside the door and let it shut behind him.
The bell over it rang once and went quiet.
I was behind the post office wicket, with the parcel scale at my elbow and a tray of cooling bread at my back.
He was six foot three in a wet charcoal coat, and the shop had never looked so small.
He had a long envelope in his left hand.
He looked at me first.
Then he looked at the baby, and I watched him stop.
"Hello, Lorcan," I said.
He didn't answer.
He was looking at the eyebrow.
Sadie looked back at him with grey eyes, the same grey as his, and took her fist out of my collar to point.
"How old is she?" he said.
"Ten months."
I watched him count backward.
I knew exactly where he got to, because I had counted it myself in a bathroom at five in the morning.
"Is she mine?"
"She's mine," I said.
"That isn't what I asked."
"She has your eyebrow. Ask the eyebrow."
One of the men at the table put down his fork very carefully.
Lorcan laid the envelope on the counter between the stamps and the scale.
"Sixty thousand dollars," he said. "The full sum. My grandmother says a Hann pays what he owes, whether the other party stayed or not."
"I didn't stay."
"No." His voice was level. "You left a note in my kitchen drawer. Term ended early, keep the rest. I read it for a month."
"You'd have read me clause seven out loud."
His jaw moved once.
He looked like a man with something to say who had decided against it.
"What's her name?"
"Sadie."
"Sadie," he said, quietly.
She reached across the counter and took hold of his lapel.
He let her.
His hand came up and stopped an inch from her head, and then he put it back in his pocket.
When he straightened, his face had gone smooth.
"She goes where I go," he said. "My lawyer can be standing at this counter by Monday. I'd rather it was today, and quiet."
"Is that a threat?" I said.
"It's a fact. I have a house with a room in it. I'd like her in that room tonight."
"With me, you mean," I said.
"If you like," he said. "Or not."
I knew what the men at the table were hearing.
A Hann from town had come to take a baby off an outport girl, and the girl was going to stand there and let him.
Every one of them had carried my mother's casket.
Not one of them moved.
They were waiting to see what I would do, and so was he.
I thought about Monday.
I thought about a lawyer at this counter, and a judge in town, and what a man with his money can make a paper say.
I thought about how much of Sadie I would have left to hold if I said no and he meant it.
"She goes where I go," I said.
Lorcan looked at me for a long moment.
"Then you'd better get your coat."
The oldest man at the table had been drinking his tea there since before I was born.
I took the Co-op keys off their nail and tossed them across.
He caught them against his chest.
"Lock up," I said. "The bread comes out at four. Tell my father where I've gone."
"And where's that, my love?"
"St. John's," I said. "With him."
Outside, the sleet had turned to rain.
I carried Sadie's car seat out of my truck and set it in the back of his, and I fed the belt through myself.
The strap was stiff with cold.
My fingers wouldn't work the buckle.
His hand came down over mine and pressed the tongue into the slot until it clicked.
His palm was warm and broad, with the old white ridge of a scar across the knuckles.
It was the first time he had touched me in ten months, and my whole arm remembered.
I slid my hand out from under his.
I buckled my daughter in and kissed her on the forehead.
Then I climbed into the back seat beside her, shut the door and said, "Drive."
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