He Told Me I Lost Our Baby, and Five Years Later I Met Him at His Door novel · Chapter 13 of 24
Chapter 13: Four in the Morning
Siobhan's POV
The third-floor door of the Shanahan house was painted dark green, and I stood in front of it at four in the morning with my hand raised.
I could not make it knock.
I had not been up these stairs in five years.
The last time, I had been carried down them.
Behind me the house was dark, and full of people breathing.
Padraig slept in a chair in the front hall with his boots on and his cap over his face.
He had said he would not leave until morning, and nobody had argued.
His wife slept on a camp bed in the room beside Oonagh's, with Fintan curled against her side and the brown dog under his chin.
I had stood in that doorway for an hour that evening and watched the boy's ribs rise and fall.
Oonagh was behind her own door on the first floor, and nobody had said a word to her since the kitchen.
I had not come to this house to sleep.
I had sat on the porch step until two, with the cold coming up through my coat.
I found that I could not go back to the laundromat and lie in a bed with a chair under the door handle.
I was a woman with a living son in a house I was afraid to leave.
I knocked twice, one knuckle.
The door opened almost at once.
He had not been asleep either.
Cormac stood there in a grey T-shirt and old black trousers, barefoot, with his right hand wrapped in white bandage to the wrist.
The dressing had bled through at the knuckles.
His eyes were red, and he looked like a man who had sat on the edge of a bed for twenty hours deciding nothing.
"Siobhan," he said.
"I'm not here for you."
"I know."
"I'm here for the boy, and for tonight," I said. "I can't be alone, and you're the only person alive who knows what I know."
"Come in," he said, and stood back from the door.
I walked into the room where I had once been kept for eleven days.
It had a high white ceiling and a big dark bed.
There was nothing in it of his mother.
He had stripped the wallpaper, and the walls were bare plaster.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of He Told Me I Lost Our Baby, and Five Years Later I Met Him at His Door are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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