He Told Me I Lost Our Baby, and Five Years Later I Met Him at His Door novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Envelope
Siobhan walks into the Shanahan Sunday table and puts a thick envelope in front of Cormac, asks where her baby is buried, and a small boy with her mother's grey eyes looks at her scan and says it is two days before his birthday. She picks him up in front of everyone and says, 'Get your mother's hand off him.'
I put the envelope down on the white tablecloth in front of my husband's plate, and thirty people stopped chewing.
It was the third Sunday of September, in the back room of his family's bar.
I had been home nine days.
He sat at the head of the long table with his sleeves rolled to the elbow and a glass of ginger ale at his hand.
He was thirty-six now, with grey coming in at his temples, and he looked at the envelope and not at me.
"Hello, Cormac," I said.
Nobody answered for me.
His mother sat on his right in a navy cardigan, with her silver hair in its roll and a rosary wound through her fingers.
She had once told me at this same table that a wife is a guest in her husband's house until she gives it an heir.
"Maureen," she said pleasantly. "You've lost weight."
My name is Siobhan, and she had known it for nine years.
"I came for one thing," I said. "I'm not staying for dinner."
I kept my coat on, a grey wool one I had bought in Lisbon.
My left wrist was bare, and the scar across it was white against my skin.
I saw two of the men look at it and then look at their plates.
"Five years ago I ran from this house," I said. "I was seven months pregnant."
The room was very quiet.
A fork touched a plate somewhere down the table and stopped.
"Your husband and his mother came to my aunt's in Worcester and brought me back in a car," I said. "That night I was given a glass of whisky, and I don't remember the rest."
Cormac's hand closed on the edge of the cloth.
"When I woke up in your guest bedroom, I was told I had lost the baby," I said. "I was told the parish had buried him quietly, and that it wasn't a place for visiting."
I looked at the man I had married at twenty-two.
"I came to bury him properly," I said. "You never told me where."
The envelope held the photographs I had brought from Lisbon, and it held the last scan I had kept from the clinic.
I had meant to leave it and walk out, and let them open it after I was gone.
Cormac did not touch it.
He sat with his big hands flat on either side of his plate, and I saw them shake once and go still.
I had known those hands for three years.
One of them had broken my wrist on the kitchen floor of this family's house, and one of them had held out a glass.
I did not feel afraid, which surprised me.
I felt like a woman standing in a cold room she had finally stopped pretending was warm.
Then the door to the kitchen banged open.
A small boy ran into the back room in his socks, with a stuffed brown dog under one arm.
He was small for his age, with dark hair that stuck up at the back and a scraped knee under his shorts.
He skidded to a stop at the head of the table, between Cormac and the old woman, and stared at me.
His eyes were grey.
They were my mother's eyes, a clear light grey with a darker ring.
I had seen them every morning of my childhood in a framed photograph on our dresser in Southie.
I stopped breathing.
"That's Fintan," the old woman said, too fast. "A friend's boy. We mind him for her. Fintan, go back to the kitchen."
The boy did not go.
He looked at the envelope, and then at my hand, because the scan had slid half out of it.
It was a grey square of print with a curled white shape in the middle, and a clinic stamp in the corner that read MAR 12.
He tilted his head and tucked his bottom lip in under his teeth.
I had done that my whole life when I was thinking, and so had my mother.
"What's that?" he asked.
"It's a picture of a baby," I said.
My voice came out steady, and I don't know how.
"That's a baby?" He frowned at it. "It looks like a bean."
"It was a bean."
"It's got a date." He squinted. "March twelve. That's two days before my birthday."
Oonagh's rosary clicked against the arm of her chair.
I looked at the scan, and then at the boy.
I did not scream.
I have gone back over that moment many times, and I am still proud of it.
I picked the scan up, and I put it in my coat pocket.
"Fintan," Oonagh said, in a voice like a closing door, "come here to Nana."
She put her hand on his shoulder with the fingers spread, and drew him back against her cardigan.
He made a small unhappy noise.
I saw her thumb press into the thin bone at the top of his arm.
Nobody at the table moved.
Thirty men and women who owed this family their rent, their jobs and their Sundays looked at the tablecloth.
His cup of milk stood on the edge of the cloth beside his plate, and it rocked as she tugged him.
I took it off the table so it would not spill.
I came around the end of the table in three steps, and Cormac's chair scraped back.
His fingers closed on my sleeve.
I felt them through the wool, hard and warm, and then I looked down at them and he opened his hand.
He let go.
He did not say my name.
I bent and picked the boy up.
He weighed almost nothing.
He came up into my arms with his stuffed dog between us, and his small hand fisted in the lapel of my coat, and he smelled of bread and soap.
He looked at my face from four inches away.
"You smell like the sea," he whispered.
"I've been on a plane," I said.
I turned to Cormac, and the whole room watched me turn.
"Get your mother's hand off him," I said.
Oonagh's fingers were still clamped on the boy's sleeve, and for a long moment nobody in that room breathed.
Cormac looked at his mother's hand.
I did not leave.
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend