He Told Me I Lost Our Baby, and Five Years Later I Met Him at His Door novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: The Kitchen Floor

He stood in the first-floor hall in his pyjamas, with his hair on end and his small fists clenched at his sides.

The nightlight by the coat stand made a yellow puddle around his feet.

He was looking up the stairs at me, with his bottom lip tucked in hard.

"Biscuit's gone," he said. "I had him, and then I didn't."

"He can't have gone far," I said.

My voice shook, and I made it level.

"He's a fast dog."

"He is." Fintan sniffed. "He's the fastest."

I crouched on the bottom stair.

I had never been this close to him with nobody watching.

He smelled of sleep and warm cotton.

"Let's look together," I said.

We found the brown dog in the second-floor linen cupboard, wedged behind a pile of towels.

I do not know how it got there, and Fintan did not care.

He seized it, wrapped himself around it and whispered, fierce and wet, "He was hiding."

"He doesn't like loud noise," I said.

"There was a loud noise."

"Somebody broke a cabinet."

"Oh." He thought about it. "Was it Daddy?"

I did not move.

I had not known the boy called anyone that.

"Which daddy?" I asked, as lightly as I could.

"The big one with the bandage." Fintan yawned into the dog's ear. "Padraig's wife says he's my daddy, but I'm not supposed to say. Nana says he isn't."

"What do you think?"

"I think he looks at me a lot," said Fintan. "He stands in doors and looks. He never says anything."

Cormac was standing at the top of the stairs.

I do not know how long he had been there.

He was in his bare feet and his T-shirt with the lamp behind him, and his bandaged hand was flat against the wall.

He did not come down, and he did not speak.

I understood all at once that he was afraid.

I had watched this man afraid of nothing for three years, and he was afraid of a five-year-old with a stuffed dog.

"Come and have some milk with me in the kitchen," I said to the boy.

Padraig's wife had come out of her room in her dressing gown, and she took Fintan's other hand without a word.

She looked at me, and then up the stairs, and I saw her decide to say nothing about my hair.

The kitchen was a ruin.

Somebody had swept up the china, but the cabinet door hung from one hinge with a hole in the middle.

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