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I squint through the haze to see Mum leaning over me, a steaming mug in her hand.
‘Mum...’ It’s a croak. My throat feels like sandpaper, my tongue too thick for my mouth.
She harrumphs and places the mug on the coffee table. ‘There’s a fresh coffee. Black, two sugars. Drink it and then maybe you’ll talk some sense.’
Every noisy syllable sends a shooting pain through my head and my gut lurches again. I fight against it, pushing myself to sit up and placing my head in my hands as I lean forward.
‘I’ll be amazed if she ever talks to you again. In truth, I’m only speaking to you because you’re my son and I have to.’
I grimace. In my hunched position, all I can see are her slipper-clad feet, tapping as she looms over me, and I can tell she’s pissed off with me. Really pissed off.
‘I told you what happened...?’ I manage to say eventually.
‘I think you gave me the edited highlights; Alexa supplied the rest when I called her this morning to apologise on your behalf.’
I groan. ‘It was really that bad?’
‘Worse.’
‘She shouldn’t have let me in. Why did she let me in?’
I shake my head. It’s a bad move because it sends my stomach on another roll.
‘Oh, I don’t know... The fact that you were buzzing her apartment at midnight and she has neighbours to consider? Or maybe, just maybe, she did it because she loves you?’
‘She doesn’t love me.’ I say it quietly, and the pain of it hurts me all the more now that I no longer have the numbing effects of alcohol in me. In fact I have the exact opposite—the morning-bloody-after effect to accompany her crushing rejection.
‘Is that so?’ Mum chirrups. ‘For a clever man, you really are stupid at times.’
‘Mum!’
‘Don’t “Mum” me. That girl has loved you for as long as she’s known you.’
I fling my head back to stare up at her, my emotional pain obliterating the physical effect of the move. ‘If that was the case then she would have said yes.’
‘To your marriage proposal?’
‘What else?’
‘That was no marriage proposal, Cain. That was you staking your claim—competing with Liam.’
I shake my head, not wanting to hear her, not wanting to think about it. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about...’
‘I know exactly what I’m talking about. You were so angry when you came here. Do you remember what you said?’
I rack my brain, trying to fill in the blanks. I rub my temples and stare at her painfully bright slippers so hard I could burn a hole through them.
‘I was angry to learn that you were complicit in keeping my daughter—’
Oh, God, my daughter.
I swallow and try to breathe. It doesn’t feel real. It can’t be...only it is.
‘We made a mistake, love, your father and I,’ she says, quietly now. ‘But it wasn’t our place to tell you.’
‘You let them get married...’
‘I know we did. We stood by them because it was what they wanted and because they loved each other in their own way. They were best friends. They stood as good a chance as any to make it work and provide a stable home for...for Rose.’
