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A smile hovered at the corner of his lips as he read the song list on the insert. “You kept it.”
Everything that reminded me of Donal had gone into the box with the pregnancy stuff. I’d been trying to purge the memories, not preserve them. Although…if I’d really wanted to get rid of them, I supposed I would have set the box out with the trash instead of burying it like a time capsule in the basement.
“We used to listen to this in my car, remember?” Donal seemed to be enjoying the trip down memory lane. “God, that old Citation I had was such a piece of shit.”
I remembered it well. I’d lost my virginity in the back seat of that car while listening to that very mixtape.
I looked away and took another drink. “Erin asked me if we were in love.”
“She did?” Donal’s voice sounded choked, as if Erin’s question had thrown him as much as it had thrown me. “What’d you say?”
“I told her we were friends who got carried away.”
“Why do you think she wanted to know?”
“I couldn’t say. She asked a lot of questions. Maybe she’s just curious about everything.”
“Do you think it matters to her?” He was still holding the mixtape, running his fingers over the scratched-up plastic case. “Would it make any difference if we’d been in love?”
“I don’t know.”
He set the mixtape down and shuffled some papers aside, unearthing a sonogram photo.
I watched him closely as he picked it up. We’d stopped speaking by the time I’d had my ultrasound, so he’d never seen it. It hadn’t occurred to me he might have wanted to. I’d been so full of anger and resentment by that point, I wasn’t sure I would have shown it to him even if he’d asked.
As his eyebrows drew together, I wondered again if I’d been so wrong about him and his interest in being a father. The way he was looking at the sonogram photo made me think yes. Except I’d never be able to forget the look of horror on his face when I told him I was pregnant. It was burned into my memory like a scar.
More likely, the passage of time and his more recent experiences with fatherhood were tinting his perception with a paternal sentimentality he hadn’t felt back then.
He set the sonogram photo down and ran his hand over the back of his neck. “I know you and I haven’t always gotten along…”
“Understatement,” I said with a snort.
Even back when we’d been friends, we’d argued and poked at each other constantly. The two of us were like oil and water. No, scratch that, we were more like vinegar and baking soda that erupted into a volcanic mess when you put us together.
Donal’s lips compressed. “I think it’s fair to say we’ve both said and done things we regret.” He raised an eyebrow, apparently waiting for me to disagree. When I didn’t, he continued. “It’s too late to change the way things turned out. But we’ve got a chance now to change the future and build a relationship with our daughter. I don’t know about you, but I’d really like to meet my first grandchild in November and be a presence in that baby’s life. I don’t want to do anything to mess that up.”
“Agreed.” I’d already spent thirty years wondering how my daughter was doing. I didn’t want to spend the next thirty wondering the same thing about a grandchild. Not if I could help it.
“If Erin’s willing to let us into her life, it’s likely you and I will be seeing a lot more of each other going forward. Holidays, birthdays, and hopefully a lot more occasions in between. In light of that, I’d like to make a proposal.”
I narrowed my eyes, Donal’s eminently reasonable lawyer voice putting me on my guard. “What?”
“From here on out, you and I try to act like a team. For Erin’s sake, and for the sake of the grandchild I want to be allowed to spoil rotten.”
“You want us to pretend to like each other?”
A muscle ticked in his jaw. “I’m suggesting we make a concerted effort to get along. We’re going to be grandparents together—don’t you think it would be better if we weren’t at each other’s throats? I’m guessing Erin will be more likely to want us in her life if we can avoid becoming those nightmare relatives who turn every family gathering into a battleground for our airing of grievances.”
I smiled despite myself. “I suppose that’s true.”
“I just think this whole situation will be easier on everyone if we can figure out a way to put up with each other. It’s liable to bring some pretty big changes to our lives, and it would be nice if we could navigate them like functional adults.” He paused, holding my gaze for a beat. “And maybe even try to support each other through it a little.”
My knee-jerk instinct was to argue that he was asking for the impossible. Combativeness had always been our default with one another. Even during the brief period when we’d let our libidos get the better of us, there’d been an underlying edge of competition to our physical relationship. The sparks that had ignited between us had been fueled as much by friction as teenage hormones.
Supporting each other wasn’t in our playbook. The first real crisis we’d faced had driven us apart and provoked three decades of bad blood. Did Donal seriously expect us to magically come together now in some kind of rah-rah kumbaya spirit after years of dysfunction?
And yet…we’d already taken the first tentative steps toward a truce. Yes, we’d fought tonight, but it had felt more like excising an old wound than inflicting new ones. We’d actually managed to talk a little without lashing out, and said some things we should have said years ago.
